The Mirror of a Bad Dream
by K. Elisabeth
Summary: When Booth is put on suspension for assaulting a child abuser, the agent must come to terms with his own dark childhood. Meanwhile, Brennan agrees to foster the child in question, enlisting Booth's aid. Rated T for theme and mild language, BB. Complete!
1. I'll Be There in a Hurry When You Call

**A/N:** If you have already read _The Foster Child in the Forensic Anthropologist_, then you will find this concept comfortably familiar (I hope). Ever since the big reveal that Booth's father was an abusive alcoholic, I have been wanting to write a chaptered fic about his childhood experiences, and how they made him the person he is today. I wrote a one-shot about it called _Swallowing Stars_, but that didn't quench my thirst. The basic idea of portraying Booth's childhood evolved into something more... and that's when this idea sprang up. :) It will be a little like _Foster Child_ in that it will catalog the experiences of Booth's childhood and how that shaped the Seeley Booth we know and love... but it will be a lot more actively involved in the present than _Foster Child_ was. I think it will be more clear what I mean at the end of this chapter.

Okay, enough babbling... enjoy!

* * *

_Today is gonna be the day  
that they're gonna throw it back to you  
By now you should've somehow  
realized what you gotta do... _

_- Wonderwall, Oasis  
_

* * *

Booth hit the "lock all" button on the driver's side door as they rolled through the ghetto, causing all the doors to secure themselves with a loud click. Brennan looked up at him, and he shrugged.

"Hey, it's a rough neighborhood," he said, gesturing out to their surroundings. Dilapidated Hardie board houses were crammed into dirty, grass-bare lots surrounded by slumping chain link fences. In many of the yards, dogs tethered on chains snapped into the air, daring the agent and his partner to come closer. Everything looked old and defeated; everything looked Poor. The houses, the cars, the people—they were covered in a grimy layer of Poorness that haunted them like a shadow, everywhere they went.

"Booth, the likelihood of someone attempting to harm us is extremely low," Brennan stated. Booth snorted.

"And why is that?" he asked.

"Because we're Caucasian," she replied. He let out a bark-like laugh, shaking his head.

"Bones, that might be the most racist thing I've ever heard you say," he said. She shook her head.

"It's not racist, it's a matter of fact," she replied. "Crime is almost exclusively intraracial. In the past thirty years, eighty-six percent of Caucasians who were murdered were murdered by another Caucasian. For African Americans it is even higher—ninety-four percent were killed by another African American person. You're more likely to find your potential murderer in Sheridan-Kalorama than here."

"I'm more likely to find my potential murderer in the most affluent neighborhood in the D.C. metro? What are they going to do, beat me to death with their wads of cash?" Booth asked, chuckling to himself.

"I'm only saying that so-called 'white-on-white crime' is much more prevalent than interracial crime. The fear upper class Caucasians have of poor African Americans is extremely unfounded."

"Well, thanks for that, Bones," Booth said, reading the numbers on the houses as they turned down the proper street. "But I'll keep my doors locked, just in case that fifteen percent shows up." She smiled and shook her head, and he put the SUV in park in front of a filthy duplex with a slanting wrap-around porch and barred windows. As they approached the porch, Booth leaned his foot gingerly on the step, unsure of whether it would support their combined weight or not. It squealed but did not fall through, and he took the stairs lightly, rapping on the right-hand door.

"Yeah?" a skinny black boy asked after he opened the door, standing before them in boxers and a hoodie. He wasn't really black—more like coffee brown, with extra creamer. He might have even been able to pass the "paper bag test" if he had been born in the Jim Crow south.

"Special Agent Seeley Booth, FBI," Booth said, flashing the boy his badge.

"You the po-lees?" the boy asked.

"Kind of, is your dad—?" Booth began to ask, but before he could finish the boy stepped inside, closing the door fast. Booth stuck his foot in the door before it shut, and it bounced back into the boy's hand.

"Hey now," Booth said, pushing the door all the way open with his hand. "I just want to talk to your dad, is he around?" Booth asked. The boy shook his head.

"No suh," he said, spreading himself as far across the entrance as he could, imagining himself bigger than the scrawny thing he was. "He gone, I dunno when he be back." Booth did not hear the boy, however, as something else had caught his attention—the pungent odor of the duplex.

"Do you have cats?" Booth asked the boy, who hesitated before shaking his head. "Bones, do you smell ammonia?" Brennan made a sour face as she smelled the air, nodding. Booth's eyes narrowed, and he brushed the boy aside as he stormed down the initial hallway into the main living area.

Inside, he saw just what he had suspected—fold-out tables littered with glass tubes and beakers, long tubes reaching down into five-gallon buckets. Empty containers of Toluene, Freon, starter fluid, and Drano littered the dirty carpet, as well as innumerable beer bottles.

"What is this?" Brennan asked, looking around with mild disgust.

"A meth lab," Booth said, his voice dark. "That's what the smell is, it's the chemicals they use. Let's get out of here." Booth turned and grabbed the small boy by the upper arm, as he looked tempted to flee. "You too, come on."

"Man, lemme go!" the boy shouted, trying in vain to pull his small arm out of Booth's grip. Booth pulled him over to the SUV and 'helped' him into the back seat, shutting him in. The boy yanked on the door handle, but to no avail—the child lock, or 'criminal lock' as was often the more correct term, prevented anyone from opening the door from the inside. Once they were all in the car and the doors were secured, Booth turned around in his seat to face the boy, whose arms were crossed defiantly.

"What's your name?" he asked the boy.

"Jamal," he replied sourly.

"Jamal, how old are you?" Booth asked.

"Ten," he replied shortly.

"You go to school?" Booth asked.

"Yes," he replied.

"Today's a school day, it's only one in the afternoon—you should be in class right now. Why aren't you?"

"I'm sick," Jamal replied. Booth gave him an incredulous look and the boy faked a cough, still glaring at the agent.

"I wouldn't be surprised if he was sick, Booth," Brennan said. "Children raised in methamphetamine labs are highly susceptible to a variety of health concerns, particularly regarding the upper-respiratory tract."

"He's not sick, his dad probably made him stay home to keep an eye on things while he was out," Booth said. "When's your dad coming home?"

"I 'onno," Jamal said, shrugging. "Didn't say."

"Well, we're going to wait here for him until he gets back," Booth said, leaning back into his seat and setting his jaw. And they did, for several hours, until it was nearly four o'clock in the afternoon. The thumping of the car's bass announced his arrival long before the car's shadow on the pavement did. As soon as Jamal's father stepped out of his battered blue El Camino, Booth swung the SUV door open, crossing the yard in a few long strides and grabbing the man by the arm. The man jerked his arm away and attempted to swing at Booth, but Booth had the element of surprise—he pinned the man up against the El Camino, wrenching his thick arms behind his back and feeling on his belt for his cuffs.

"Sir, is this your residence?" he asked loudly into the man's ear.

"This my house," he yelled back. "Get offa me! Jamal!"

"Booth," Brennan called out. Booth turned around and saw the boy scrambling out of the back seat, over the centerpiece, and exiting through the driver's side door. In his moment of surprise the man wrenched free of Booth's grasp, and ran across the yard to meet the boy. He brought his fist back and knocked the child to the ground in one fell swoop. The boy cried out, and Booth caught fire.

"Hey!" he yelled out. The man turned around, and was promptly rendered unconscious by Booth's solid fist. Then everything went fuzzy. After a while, Booth became conscious of the fact that he was repeatedly kicking the man in the back and yelling something incomprehensible. Brennan was attempting to put herself between Booth and the unconscious perp, beseeching him with muted words. Suddenly he could hear them.

"…hurting him, Booth, stop!" she said in a strained voice, grabbing his balled up fists with her soft hands and pushing him away from the man. He took two steps back and breathed heavily, feeling the sweat bead up on his brow. He looked around—several faces in nearby windows watched him with wide eyes, and Jamal sat in a trembling, crumpled heap in the middle of the yard, trying to stem the flow of blood from his nose with his jacket sleeve.

Within ten minutes local police, the DEA, an EMT, and Sam Cullen had arrived on scene. Jamal's father had been deemed in need of an x-ray to assess whether any severe damage had been done to his kidneys or spleen, and handcuffed to his stretcher. Booth leaned against the hood of his car, still seething with rage, as Cullen paced back and forth before him. If Booth was mad, Cullen was mad to the power of eight.

"Attacking suspects, sending them to the hospital!" Cullen burst out, rubbing a hand over his bald head in sheer incredulity.

"He hit that—" Booth started, but Cullen rounded on him before he could finish.

"I don't care who he hit, Booth, you assaulted a suspect while carrying your badge and gun! Two things, by the way, that I want from you immediately."

"He hit that kid, Cullen," Booth hissed, jerking a thumb towards the second ambulance, where an EMT was packing Jamal's nose with gauze. "He knocked the shit out of him. I couldn't just—"

"He hit that kid, he's a dirt bag, I get it!" Cullen raged. "But you _assaulted_ him, Booth. You kicked the shit out of him! I can't have my agents kicking the shit out of people who make them angry!"

"Alright Cherie, what did you get yourself into this time?" Caroline Julian asked, her voice louder than the combined racket of the police and DEA officers as they turned the house upside down.

"You called Caroline?" Booth asked Brennan, who had been standing by his side while Cullen chewed him out. She shrugged.

"You called her when I got in trouble in New Orleans," she said. "I thought it would be a good idea."

"You were facing murder charges," he pointed out.

"And you're gonna be facing charges of police brutality," Caroline said, pointing her finger at Booth.

"Caroline," Cullen greeted with a head nod.

"Sam," she returned. "So where's the boy?" Booth motioned over to the ambulance, where Jamal was holding a pack of ice against his swelling face. She tutted audibly.

"Hittin' a child, I don't know how anyone can do it," she said sadly. "I understand your anger, Cherie, I really do. Your action, now that was just plain stupid… but your anger I understand."

"Is he going to press charges?" Brennan asked.

"Yes," Cullen answered. "He was asking for a lawyer between screams when they loaded him into the ambulance."

"I think if we offer him a decreased sentence on the drug charges, he'd be willing to drop the police brutality charge," Caroline said.

"But the kid!" Booth started, but Caroline put up a hand.

"I didn't say he would get off on the child abuse charges," she said. "This man's a multiple offender. Operating a meth lab, illegal drug possession, illegal drug sales, child neglect, child endangerment, child abuse, aggravated assault, assault of an officer—"

"I wouldn't call what he did assault," Booth interjected, but Caroline cleared her throat loudly.

"He swung at you, didn't he?" she asked. Booth nodded. "Then it was assault. This man's going away for a long time—him getting a few years knocked off of the drug charges to clear you isn't gonna affect anything."

"You think he'll be cleared?" Brennan asked Caroline. She nodded.

"I think so," Caroline said. "I've seen this before. Police get a little too… what's the word… overzealous when dealing with child abusers. Happens more than you think; it just never makes it to court. Just like when one of 'em turns up dead in prison with a home-made shiv stickin' outta his back… people just don't ask questions about that, Cherie. They don't care. It's just one less sicko in the world."

"Good," Cullen said, turning to Booth. "For now, you're suspended. If all this clears up and the board approves, I don't mind reinstating you. I'm not saying the guy didn't deserve to get the shit kicked out of him… you just don't need to be the one doing the kicking. Got it?" Booth nodded, and Cullen bid them farewell.

"So what happens to Jamal?" Booth asked, suddenly remembering the reason for the fiasco. Caroline shrugged.

"From what I can tell, that was his last little bit of family you were kickin' into the ground there. He'll go into the system." Booth felt his stomach bottom out—the foster care system would turn a kid like Jamal into a class-A criminal, no doubt. He looked to Brennan, who eyed him cautiously.

"Bones," he began, though as soon as he had opened his mouth she had started shaking her head.

"Booth, I can't raise a ten year old," Brennan said. "I don't know anything about boys."

"Bones, the system will turn him into a criminal," Booth pleaded. "He needs you."

"How do you know I won't turn him into a criminal?" she asked. Her question was sincere but to Booth it was deadpan humor. He smiled, but his eyes implored her to her depths.

"Please, Temperance." He dragged the first name out of the arsenal, causing her to tilt her head slightly, biting her bottom lip. "This kid can't handle the system, he needs guidance. He needs someone to help him get through this."

"I can't handle a ten year old boy," she said. "You're the one with a son."

"I'll help," he promised. "I'll help, I'll be there, I'll do anything. But you're the registered foster parent, not me. He needs you. I need you." She sighed heavily, and Booth thought she might bite through her lip. She shut her eyes for a moment, then nodded.

"Okay," she said in defeat. "Okay. We'll try it."

"Oh Lord in Heaven," Caroline uttered, throwing her hands up in the air. "Dr. Brennan and a hood rat, this is gonna be ugly."

"Caroline!" Booth exclaimed. "Bones will be a great foster mom. You'll be a great foster mom," he assured, turning his attention back to her. "You'll be the best parent Jamal ever had."

"You think so?" Brennan asked, looking past Booth warily at the boy, who was chewing on the clean sleeve of his jacket and staring out into the street, engrossed in thought.

"Definitely," Booth said. "Now, let's get down to social services before you change your mind."

* * *

**A/N:** Sometime in the next chapter or two we'll get into Booth's past, but for now we've got some more pressing matters in the present to deal with. What are your thoughts on the first chapter? Love it? Hate it? Have any feeling about it whatsoever? Leave me a review and let me know! :)

Oh, and from a legal standpoint, I have no idea if they could orchestrate a "trade off" to get Booth off of police brutality charges... I just kind of made that up, since I couldn't find any laws pertaining to it. If you know for a fact that I'm wrong, please let me know! I love accuracy.


	2. You Had the World Inside Your Hand

**A/N:** Happy New Year! I wanted to get this chapter written and posted fairly quickly, since I got a lot of reviews on the first chapter pretty fast. Also I'm a little bit New Year's drunk and when I drink I like to write... I can't attest to the quality of the writing, but I like to nonetheless. :) Don't judge me.

Anyway... enjoy the chapter!

* * *

_Father of mine  
Tell me, where did you go?  
You had the world inside your hand  
but you did not seem to know  
Father of mine  
Tell me, what do you see?  
When you look back at your wasted life  
and you don't see me..._

_- Father of Mine, Everclear  
_

* * *

Brennan tucked the corners of the sheets up underneath the mattress in the guest bedroom, pulling the end up towards the pillows and smoothing it down. They were blue; boys liked blue, right? It was, at any rate, the socially acceptable color to assign to a male's belongings. That color had originally been pink in centuries previous, but by the mid 1900s had been changed to blue. She didn't understand why, but she knew that it was.

She realized she was smoothing the sheets obsessively, and removed her hands. Booth would be calling any minute with the results of his meeting with Caroline and the board, knowing whether or not he would be facing charges of police brutality, and whether he could even be reinstated to his post at the FBI. She couldn't imagine working without Booth—and in fact, wouldn't. As much as she liked solving murders, she would simply resolve her duties with the FBI and go back to identifying ancient remains. That was, after all, her first and foremost passion. This was only a recent development in the years. A lot of things had become recent development in the years.

Suddenly her phone rang and she jumped, snatching it up off the bedside table and answering without checking the caller ID—she knew who it would be anyway.

"Brennan," she answered.

"Dr. Brennan, this is Cindy from Social Services," a woman's voice said. Hrmph, not Booth. But still an important call.

"Yes, hi, how are you?" Brennan asked cordially.

"Fine, thanks," Cindy responded. "Jamal Williams, the boy you're interested in fostering? No other family to speak of. We did the digging all last night and into this morning—he's got one aunt, but she's at a rehab clinic in Arlington. Whatever other family he might have… well, they just don't exist in records, anyway. Jamal's house mom is dropping him off down here in about an hour, if you'd like to meet here to pick him up."

"Sure, absolutely," Brennan said, her stomach flip-flopping. "I'll be there shortly."

"Great," Cindy said. "And thank you, Dr. Brennan. Not many foster parents are keen on taking in a troubled ten-year-old boy. It's a shame, since they're the ones who need individual attention the most."

"Yes," Brennan said, thinking the woman sounded peculiarly like Booth. "I'll be there in an hour."

"We'll see you then," Cindy said, and they hung up. No sooner had Brennan set the phone on the bedside table than it rang again. She looked at the Caller ID this time when she picked it up.

"Hey," she said, picking up the line. "What happened?"

"Caroline haggled me out of excessive force charges," Booth said, sounding relieved. "They offered the guy a reduced sentence on the drug charges, he took it without asking questions."

"Did he need extensive medical care?" Brennan asked, remembering the way Booth had repeatedly kicked the fallen man in the back and head.

"No, he's fine other than some bruising," Booth said tersely.

"That's good," Brennan said. "So what about your position, did Cullen and the board reinstate you?"

"That's the not-so-good news," Booth said, and Brennan inhaled sharply.

"They didn't fire you, did they?" she asked, her voice coming out higher than she had expected it to. She cleared her throat.

"No, no," Booth said quickly. "I'm not fired, but I am on probation. They're putting me on 'medical leave' and making me see a shrink. They think I have unresolved issues or something." Brennan secretly had to agree—she had never seen Booth react with such unabashed violence, with such deep-seeded rage. It was like seeing him turn into an entirely different person—like something in him snapped, just like that.

"Oh," was all she said in response, though. She knew better than to vocally agree with the board on their ruling.

"Yeah," he said, aggravated. "They won't give me my badge back until I've completed therapy and 'resolved my inner conflicts' or some shit like that."

"Are you seeing Gordon Gordon again?" she asked.

"No, that's the worst part," he said. "They're making me see Sweets." Brennan smiled.

"Why's that?" she asked, trying to conceal the grin in her voice. She knew how much it would ire Booth to have Sweets in control of his situation.

"Since we already work with him," he said. "They figure he's the best choice, I guess. I start tomorrow, and as soon as Sweets gives me the okay, I'll be back to work."

"You know Dr. Sweets isn't going to give you a free pass on this one," Brennan pointed out, rising from the bed and resmoothing the sheets.

"I know," Booth said, sounding none too pleased. "But it's what I have to do, so I guess I'll just grin and bare it. Hey, how are things with Jamal?"

"I'm actually going to pick him up in about forty-five minutes," Brennan said. "I'm nervous, Booth. I don't know how to deal with boys."

"You had Andy with you for a week, you did fine with him," Booth pointed out soothingly.

"Genetically, yes, Andy was a male, but I'm talking about the prescribed gender qualities exhibited by males. Babies are essentially androgynous; they don't behave in a way that is male or female. They're just babies. This little boy is… a boy."

"You'll be fine," Booth said. "Do you want me to go with you to pick him up?"

"Yes," Brennan said, sounding relieved. "I would really appreciate that."

"I'll be there soon, then," Booth said, hanging up the phone. Brennan sighed, sitting back down on the bed and then jumping up quickly as if it was on fire. She smoothed the sheets for a third time, shaking her head. What had she gotten herself into?

Before long Booth was rapping on her front door, carrying a brown paper grocery bag in his arms. She let him in and eyed the bag curiously, but he shook his head, curling the top of the bag and sticking it in the fridge.

"That's for later," he said, pushing her out of her own kitchen. "Let's get going, traffic is gonna be terrible." They took the SUV, battling the metro traffic across town to the social services office. It was in neither the best nor the worst area of town, though the children passing through there overwhelmingly came from the latter. Brennan twisted the material of her jacket in her fingers nervously; so much that Booth finally reached over and enclosed her anxious hands in one of his at a red light, smiling at her.

"Relax," he insisted. "Just relax. It'll be fine."

A bell sounded when they walked through the door, and a front desk clerk asked them to be seated. They had no sooner sat down than a small, portly woman with curly blonde hair came into the room, smiling broadly at them.

"You must be Dr. Brennan," she said, shaking Brennan's hand as she stood. "I'm Cindy, we spoke earlier. And this is…?"

"Special Agent Seeley Booth," he said, offering her his hand. "We're partners."

"Great," Cindy said, eyeing the pair. "If you two will just come back this way, Jamal just got dropped off about ten minutes ago. He's waiting in back with me." They followed the woman down the hall and around the corner, into a small office whose door bore her name on a plaque. Just inside the door, Brennan saw the small boy they had encountered yesterday, now in jeans and a clean hooded sweater, putting together a puzzle.

"Jamal, your foster mom is here," Cindy said, rapping the door slightly with her knuckles as she opened it. He looked up briefly, then back down at the puzzle.

"Okay," he said vaguely, though Brennan could see his hand quiver as he reached for another piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

"Hi," Brennan said awkwardly to the boy, who resolutely ignored her. "I'm Dr. Brennan… uh, Temperance."

"I'm not calling you mom," Jamal said, looking up at her. "You're not my mom."

"You're right," Brennan said, not sure what exactly to make of the boy. "Biologically I'm not your mother, so I wouldn't expect you to ascribe me the Western moniker."

"What?" Jamal said blankly, his brows scrunching together.

"She means she's okay with that," Booth offered, holding his hand out to the boy. "I'm Agent Booth, remember me?"

"Yeah," Jamal said with mild distaste, not taking the man's hand. "You put my dad in jail."

"Yeah," Booth said, taking the hand and rubbing the back of his hair with it. "Yeah, I did. I'm sorry about that, kiddo, but when you break the law, you go to jail. That's how it works." Jamal shrugged and placed the last piece of the puzzle, rising from his seat.

"All set, then?" Cindy said, clapping her hands together and smiling in an attempt to diffuse the awkwardness. Jamal nodded, grabbing the small duffle bag lying on the floor next to him. Brennan's heart dropped—she knew how he felt, that lost, displaced feeling. Knowing your entire world was being dragged around in a hand-me-down bag.

"Let's go," Booth said, leading both Brennan and Jamal out of the building. Jamal eyed the SUV warily as they approached it.

"Booth, can you turn off the child lock?" Brennan asked politely, looking at the boy out of the corner of her eye. Booth nodded, and Jamal let himself into the back seat. Just to check, he quickly opened the door, then, satisfied in knowing that he was not locked in, he shut it and put on his seatbelt. Booth grinned at Brennan, who smiled back.

"Good shot, Bones," he said before letting himself into the car.

The drive home was a long one, and quiet. As they were sitting in traffic, Brennan attempted to strike up a conversation with the child, who peered aimlessly out the window, chewing on his jacket sleeve.

"What kind of music do you like, Jamal?" she asked the boy, who shrugged.

"I'unno," he said noncommittally. "Stuff, I guess."

"What kind of 'stuff'?" she probed further.

"Rap," he finally answered. "Pac, Biggie, Nas. Stuff like that."

"Do you like Kanye West?" she asked. Jamal looked up.

"How you know him?" he asked. She smiled.

"I like him, too," she said. "I have his CDs at the house if you want to listen to them." For the first time, Jamal smiled.

"You know, most white ladies don't like rap," he pointed out. Brennan smiled.

"I guess I'm not like most white ladies," she responded.

"That's the truth," Booth piped in, positively beaming.

"What about you?" Jamal asked Booth. "What kinda music you like?" Booth thought for a minute before he answered.

"Mostly rock," he said. Jamal made a face, and Booth laughed. "Hey, I don't mean that screamo stuff. Real rock. Aerosmith, Led Zep, Whitesnake, Foreigner. Mostly 80s stuff."

"Man, that's old," Jamal said, waving his hand.

"Hey, I'm older than most of that music," Booth said. Jamal raised his eyebrows and smiled slyly.

"I guess that makes you old, then," the boy said. Booth frowned and Brennan grinned.

"He's got you there, Booth," she said.

"Hey, you're just as old as I am," Booth pointed out.

"Yeah but she like cool music," Jamal said. "That mean she cool." Booth fake pouted.

"Can I be cool too?" he asked. Jamal shrugged.

"I dunno, maybe if you start listenin' to cool music, you will be," he replied.

"She listens to Foreigner too," Booth said, indicating towards Brennan as they turned into her apartment complex's parking lot. "You should try it, it's good stuff."

"Right," Jamal said, grabbing his bag and hopping out of the car. He stood hesitantly in the doorway when Brennan unlocked her apartment, peering into the doorway cautiously, teetering on his toes.

"Come on," Brennan said as she and Booth entered, the boy finally following them cautiously.

"Wow," was all he said at first, taking in his surroundings.

"You like it?" Brennan said. He swallowed.

"Man, you must be all _kind_ of rich!" he exclaimed, dropping his bag and lacing his fingers on top of his head. "Lookit all them CDs! Lookit that big screen TV!"

"I made her buy that," Booth threw in, smiling at Brennan.

"Man, who you jacked for all this?" he asked, and Brennan gave him a questioning look, as if he were speaking a different language.

"I… don't understand the question," she said.

"She writes books," Booth answered for her. "She also works with me, solving crimes." Jamal gave her a distrusting look.

"You work with the law?" he asked. She nodded.

"Sometimes," she said. "I look at a person's bones to see how they died." Jamal wrinkled his nose.

"Gross," he said. Booth laughed.

"It is," he agreed.

"Let me show you your room," Brennan said, leading the boy into the guest bedroom, which she had set up for him with clean bedding. He looked around the room, taking everything in before he spoke.

"This is all mine?" he said, setting his small bag down on the foot of the bed.

"Yes," Brennan replied. "This is your room, and tomorrow we'll go to the store and get you some things to decorate it."

"You mean it?" he asked, running his fingers along the bedspread as he looked around. Brennan nodded.

"Yes," she said.

"Hey, I have something for everyone," Booth said, suddenly remembering his parcel. "Come on, let's go to the kitchen." Brennan and Jamal followed Booth into the kitchen, where he retrieved the brown paper bag. He opened it up and withdrew a small, circular cake. In sticky blue lettering on the top it said, "Welcome home, Jamal!" He set it on the table and Brennan and Jamal sat around it, both staring at it as Booth rifled through her drawers for candles.

"This is… this is for me?" the boy asked. Brennan gulped, taken aback by emotion herself.

"Yes," she finally managed. Jamal sighed heavily, much too heavily for a ten year old boy.

"Got 'em!" Booth piped from the kitchen, returning with a handful of candles. He set them into the cake and lit them, flicking off the lights.

"But it's not my birthday," Jamal pointed out. Booth shrugged.

"Who cares? Make a wish and blow 'em out," he said. The boy thought for a minute before finally blowing the candles out. Booth cut the cake and the three of them ate at Brennan's dining room table, mostly silent except for the occasional fulfilled sigh or hum.

"What time are ten year old boys supposed to go to bed?" Brennan finally asked, looking up at the clock and realizing it was ten-thirty. Jamal snickered.

"Like, an hour ago," he said, grinning. He set his plate on the counter next to the sink, and as he was walking away Booth got up with his plate.

"Hey, how about we rinse these off together?" he said, turning the boy around and turning the faucet on. Brennan watched in awe as Booth seamlessly stepped into the fatherhood role, instructing the boy to clean up after himself without ever having to act as an authoritarian. She wondered if she would ever be able to parent like that, so effortlessly.

After Jamal had brushed his teeth and gone to bed, Booth settled next to Brennan on the couch, where she rested her head against the seat and shut her eyes.

"Long day?" he asked, and she sighed.

"How do you know what to do?" she asked.

"Practice," Booth answered honestly. "You just learn what works and what doesn't. You'll figure it out."

"What if I do something wrong?" Brennan asked. Booth laughed.

"You will," he answered, and she opened her eyes and stared at him. He shrugged. "What? I'm being honest—you're going to make mistakes. Everyone does with kids; you make mistakes and you learn from them. That's how it is."

"I don't think I'm ready for this," Brennan admitted.

"Too late now," Booth said, motioning towards Jamal's closed door. "He's here, and unless you send him back he's not going anywhere."

"I could never do that," she said quietly. "I know how that feels." Booth wrapped his arm around her shoulders, allowing her head to rest on him.

"I know, Bones," he said quietly, giving her shoulder a squeeze. "That's why you're going to be so good at this. Just remember what it was like for you, and go with your instinct. That's all you can do."

"I don't even know what to say to him," she said.

"What do you mean?" Booth said. "You guys bonded right away over music in the car, remember? You know exactly what to say, you just think too hard about it. You're a lot better at this than you think you are."

"Really?" Brennan asked, starting to smile. Booth grinned back.  
"Really really," he responded.

After a while Booth headed back home, leaving Brennan alone to contend with Jamal. He knew she would do fine—she just needed a confidence boost, was all. They would go shopping together tomorrow after he got done with his therapy appointment with Sweets.

_Ugh._ Thinking about it made his insides twist, for a reason he couldn't pin. He ignored it and turned on the radio, tuning into an all-80s station and vaguely singing along as he followed the familiar path home.

* * *

**A/N:** So what did you think? Like it? Hate it? Curious to see where this is going? Next chapter will be the first in the series of flashbacks, egged on by my favorite TV shrink... Sweets! Leave a review and let me know what you think. :)


	3. Close My Eyes When I Get Too Sad

**A/N:** I know you're probably all about to fall over because I NEVER post this many chapters in this many days. It usually takes me what, a week between chapters, maybe more? But I've been in the writing mood lately, and as a friend of mine told me, "if you're feeling inspired, then do it." Good advice. :) Classes start again next week, so I will be much busier... since I won't have as much time to update then, I might as well get as much done as I can now, right? I will still be shooting to update at least once a week, but I'm just saying... don't get too used to this chapter-a-day business, haha. Anyway, enough of that... enjoy!

* * *

_They cry in the dark, so you can't see their tears  
They hide in the light, so you can't see their fears  
Forgive and forget, all the while  
Love and pain become one and the same  
in the eyes of a wounded child...  
_

_- Hell is for Children, Pat Benatar  
_

* * *

When Brennan awoke the next morning, she rolled over onto her other side, pressing her face into the pillow. Getting up was inarguably the most difficult part of any day. The waking sun shone through her linen curtains, and she groaned. If only the coffeemaker could start itself.

She suddenly jumped to attention, however, when she remembered there was a ten-year-old boy living in her house. She listened for sounds—the television, music, glass objects breaking. Nothing. She threw on a robe and slippers and padded into the living room, expecting to find him reading quietly or pursuing some other harmless endeavor. When she didn't find him there, she rapped gently on his bedroom door.

"Jamal?" she called out, to no response. She opened the door and found his messy, unmade bed, clothes thrown into a heap on the floor. He was not in the bathroom, or the kitchen, or the balcony. Feeling her heart race, she called his name out again. It echoed throughout the empty apartment.

_Shit,_ she thought anxiously, throwing the door open and calling his name down the hallway of the building. _I haven't had him for twelve hours and I've already lost him._ She ran down the stairwell and burst out the lobby entrance, her breath catching in her chest when she looked out into the parking lot.

There he was, safe and sound. He reached down and took a handful of gravel from the parking lot, picking and choosing the largest pieces and dumping the rest. One by one he chucked them across the parking lot at a "24-Hour Tow" sign, each rock pinging off the metal like a bell sounding. She let the caught breath out in a relieved sigh, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her palms.

"Jamal," she called out. The boy did not turn, but picked up another handful of gravel. "Jamal," she repeated, and this time he sighed and turned around.

"Yeah?" he said. She approached him with her arms crossed, and he crossed his in mime, dropping the rocks from his palms.

"You didn't tell me where you were going," she said. He looked around, as if confused.

"I ain't go nowhere," he said. "I's just in the parking lot. I ain't allowed in the parking lot?" Brennan sighed, dropping her arms.

"Not without telling me where you are," she answered. "I was worried you had run off."

"What, 'cause I'm black I'm'a run away every time you turn around?" he asked bitterly, turning his back on her and sweeping more rocks from the ground. Another one went sailing through the air, hitting the image on the sign dead center. A bird took flight from one of the trees crowding the lot, cawing aggravatedly.

"No," Brennan said, choosing her words. "Because you're a troubled ten year old boy."

"What, so I'm 'troubled'?" Jamal asked angrily. "I ain't done nothin' to you but you can't trust me? That ain't fair."

"You're right, you've done nothing to lose my trust," Brennan said, understanding the boy's need for a reason but not sure exactly how to reason with a child. "But you haven't done anything to earn it either."

"Man, that shit's whack," Jamal lamented, throwing the handful of gravel at the ground angrily and storming off.

"Don't say shit!" Brennan called out to the boy, who stopped in front of the apartment door and turned around.

"Why not?" he yelled out. Brennan put her hand on her hip, biting her bottom lip.

"I… I don't know," she responded. "I just know the use of vulgar language by children is viewed negatively by society. I'm not sure why." Jamal gave her a genuinely puzzled look, then shook his head and sighed irately, slamming the door behind him as he stomped up the stairs. She rubbed her temples with her thumb and index finger, making a pained face. Last night's… what would Booth call it… _honeymoon period_ was definitely over.

On the other side of town, Booth sat in Sweets's office, leaned back into the couch with his arms draped over the back. He stared at Sweets defiantly, his usual charming grin replaced with something a little darker, a little more aggressive. Sweets smiled back unassumingly, uncapping his pen and marking the date at the top of a yellow pad of paper.

"So, Agent Booth," he began, resting his ankle on his knee. "You were referred to me by the disciplinary board at the Bureau, is that correct?"

"Why else would I be sitting here with you?" Booth asked tartly. Sweets smiled and wrote down a few shorthand words.

"You know, Agent Booth, answering a question with a question is both an aggressive and evasive tool," Sweets observed. "Why do you think you're evading my question?"

"Maybe because I'm irritated!" Booth said through gritted teeth.

"And why is that?" Sweets asked. Booth sighed loudly.

"Because I'm here, Sweets, with you. And you are twelve. You play World of Warcraft and watch cartoons on Saturday morning and get excited when your mommy lets you stay up past ten. This is a waste of my time."

"Agent Booth, I'm sensing a little hostility—"

"No, really?" Booth interrupted, but Sweets continued.

"—but I don't think you're angry with me personally. You're just using me as a scapegoat for your internalized anger, the same anger that overtook you when you attacked Mr. Williams."

"I didn't attack him," Booth groused. Sweets raised his eyebrows.

"What would you call it, then?" he asked. Booth rubbed his face, annoyed.

"I don't know," he finally answered. "Karma. Vengeance. Giving him what he had coming to him."

"Why did he have it coming to him?" Sweets asked. Booth's face darkened.

"Because he hit that kid!" he nearly shouted. He took a moment to regain composure. "He hit that kid. He knocked him down, just like… just like that."

"And that angered you," Sweets said.

"Of course it angered me! Wouldn't you be pissed if you saw a big guy smack a little kid around?"

"Naturally," Sweets said. "But I don't think your actions were motivated solely by the inequity of the fight. Am I right?" Booth didn't answer the question, but turned the other way, focusing steadfastly on the far wall.

"Am I right, Agent Booth?" Sweets asked again.

"I don't know," Booth responded brusquely. "Maybe. I don't know."

"Did your father ever strike you as a child, Agent Booth?" Sweets asked. Booth nearly jumped out of his seat.

"I love my father," he answered aggressively, leaning in towards Sweets and puffing his chest.

"I never questioned your love for your father, Agent Booth," Sweets maintained calmly, though scooting back in his seat a bit. "All I asked was if he ever hit you when you were a child, in the same way Mr. Williams hit his son. That would certainly be a powerful motivator for your actions."

"My father did what he felt like he needed to," Booth defended. "You don't know what it's like. To try to raise a family on no money, to come back from war and… you don't know what he had to do to make ends meet. You have no right to judge him."

"I'm not judging him, Agent Booth," Sweets said. "My question was completely objective, a simple yes or no. Did your father ever hit you?" Booth set his jaw, crossing his arms over his broad chest and staring down at the table between them. He jiggled his leg anxiously, tensing and loosening his muscles. He looked up at the ceiling and closed his eyes, sighing heavily.

Seeley Booth bounced up and down on the dugout bench, smacking loudly on a piece of bubble gum. He was seven years old, and it was his first real baseball game. Not tee-ball, where they put a big soft ball on a stand and let you swing as many times as you want until you hit it. No, this was real baseball, with a pitcher and outfield and rules and winners. He blew a bubble that popped on his freckled face, and he pulled the sticky mess off of his nose and grinned.

His father loved baseball. So did he, by default. Sometimes his dad would close the barbershop on Saturdays when there was a big Phillies game, and he would take Seeley and Jared to the big field to watch the game. On really good days he would just take Seeley, and they would have the afternoon to themselves. They would get big loaded chilidogs and cokes and lean on the railing with their gloves and strain their arms into the sky for pop-ups. They never caught one, but they always tried. When the crowds got thick dad would lift Seeley onto his shoulders so he could see over everyone, and he felt like a giant, on top of the world. He was on top of his world.

Coach called Seeley's name—he was next in the line up. He grabbed his bat and strutted out to home plate, resting the bat leisurely on his shoulder. He turned to the bleachers, where a smattering of parents sat and cheered loyally. He saw his mother, sitting in the very front row with a baseball cap covering her curly brown hair. She beamed and waved at him, shouting his name. He looked to either side of her, and his smile fell—his dad wasn't there.

_Maybe he got up to go to the bathroom,_ Seeley thought to himself, and bolstered his heart with the notion. He missed the first pitch, but nailed the second, a pee-wee line drive that hit the ground half-way to second base and rolled just past it into the outfield. He pumped his arms as he dashed to first base, making it long before the discombobulated outfielders could retrieve the ball and get it back to home plate.

He looked into the cheering crowd, and saw his mother jumping up and down and waving to him. His father, though, was still mysteriously absent. How could he still be in the bathroom? He promised this morning, before Billy's parents came to pick Seeley up for pre-game warm ups, he promised he would be there. Grandma was going to watch Jared, and mom and dad were going to come to his game. That's how it was supposed to be. He felt something in him deflate as he slowly rounded the bases, eventually running into home plate to score. His mother was positively ecstatic, and he managed to smile for her as she snapped innumerable photos of him. He knew she would want that.

His dad never came. He rode silently in the back seat of his mom's old jalopy, listening uninterestedly as she babbled on and on about what a great game he had played. His silence didn't go unnoticed, and she looked sympathetically into the rear-view mirror.

"Honey, I'm sorry your dad couldn't make it," she said, reaching into the back seat and giving his knee a squeeze. "He really wanted to, but he had to open the shop today."

"He said he was going to close it today," Seeley said, staring out the window. "He said he would close it for my big game."

"I know sweetie," his mom crooned. "But sometimes these things happen. He'll be there next time, okay? Now cheer up, you won!" He smiled and nodded, biting his bottom lip when she turned her eyes back to the road. Big boys didn't cry—he wouldn't cry. He was a big boy. He played baseball. Big boys play baseball, they don't cry. They don't cry.

When they got home, the first thing Seeley noticed was his father's antique 1955 Coupe DeVille with the hood propped up in the driveway. The old Caddy's red paint sparkled in the waning late afternoon sunlight, and it looked to Seeley like a big piece of hard candy. As soon as his mother cut the car's engine at the curb, he jumped out of the car with his little league trophy in hand, sprinting across the small front yard. The houses in their neighborhood were tall Hardie-board structures, with deeply pitched roofs and narrow alleyways in between. They had a front porch small enough to sneeze across, and a narrow driveway that lead to a one-car garage. The one car in the garage was always dad's Caddy—the family's other two cars found themselves parked outside in the elements. They were the redheaded stepchildren—the Caddy was the Chosen one.

"Dad! Dad!" Seeley called out, braking just short of the Caddy's open door. His father was seated in the driver's throne, fiddling with something on the dashboard. He did not look up at the boy, but grunted to acknowledge his presence.

"Dad, dad, dad," Seeley repeated breathlessly, all former resentment forgotten as soon as he had seen his father's face. "Lookit, dad, we won!" Seeley's father finally looked up, squinting at the trophy in the boy's hands.

"Did you score?" he asked. Seeley grinned.

"Yeah! Twice!" he said, thrusting the trophy into his father's hands. "We won six to three, and I hit a double, dad! I got all the way to second base!" His father took the trophy in his hand, looked down at it momentarily, then set it aside on the seat.

"That's good, son," he said, turning his attention back to the car. Seeley hung over the side of the door, looking in at his dad's work.

"Dad, where were you?" he asked. "You said you were gonna be there."

"I had to take care of some things," his dad answered vaguely.

"But you said you were gonna—"

"Damnit, Seeley, I had things I had to take care of, alright?" his dad yelled, grasping the steering wheel in white-knuckled fingers. In later years Seeley would understand—the bleary eyes, the sharp smell on his father's breath. He would understand one day, but this was not the day.

"Oh… okay," Seeley said, turning his eyes towards the ground and resting his chin on his arms.

"And get off the Caddy, willya?" his dad said, grabbing the boy's arms in his rough hand and shoving him backwards. Seeley attempted to control his balance but lost it, and fell onto his butt on the pavement. One of his elbows partially broke his fall, and the skin sloughed off. He felt tears prick his eyes, but he was determined not to cry.

"Ow," however, did escape his lips. His father looked around the side of the open door, eyes narrowed.

"Ow? What, that hurt?" he asked, stepping out of the car. Seeley cradled his skinned elbow in his opposite hand, looking up at his very tall, very intimidating father. He did not look happy.

"A little," he whispered, thinking as soon as the words left his mouth that he maybe should not have answered at all.

"A little? What the hell kind of player d'ya think you are, can't even handle a scrape? What, bust your ass on the pavement and you wanna go cry about it? Sheesh, get the hell out. I'm glad I didn't go to that stupid game; I don't wanna see a bunch of whiny-ass kids cryin' all over the field. Get up." Seeley turned his eyes to the pavement, determined not to look his father in the face. Big boys don't cry. Baseball players don't cry. They don't. They won't.

"I said get up!" his father hollered, snatching Seeley up by the arm and yanking him to his feet in one sudden jerk. He had barely regained his balance when he felt his father's broad hand shove him down onto the pavement again, this time knocking him square in the back. This time his palms reached out in front of him, bearing the brunt of the fall. They immediately began to bleed, droplets staining the pressure-washed cement.

"Did that hurt, huh?" his father yelled down at the boy, who whimpered quietly but did not reply. "You gonna cry about that too? Big fuckin' baby, sheesh. Wipe your snot and grow a set, and don't come back into my house until you do." With that his father stormed into the house, screen door banging behind him. His mother had already left to pick his little brother up from their grandmother's house. He was very alone.

He pressed his bleeding palms together in an attempt to stop the blood flow, which worked moderately well. He wiped his nose on his jersey sleeve, blinking his eyes hard. The sun dipped down behind his house, casting the building's large, heavy shadow over him. He pressed the back of his hands against his eyes, forcing the water back in. He wouldn't cry. Big boys don't cry.

* * *

**A/N:** This chapter was kind of difficult for me to write, for various reasons. There's not much more to say about that. Also, the song quoted at the beginning of this chapter ("Hell is for Children" by Pat Benatar) is a great piece, something everyone should listen to at least once. So is the song in the previous chapter, "Father of Mine" by Everclear. In fact, I personally think all the songs I quote in the beginnings of chapters are good songs... so you can always take that as a suggestion to listen. :)

So, what did you think of the chapter? Please leave a review and let me know!


	4. You Can Be Anything in The World

**A/N:** I told you I was going to get busy! xD I felt bad, giving you three chapters in three days, then leaving you hanging for almost 2 weeks. But that's what happens - life gets crazy. I've been doing this in bits and pieces as I've had time, and finally got it done today. I'm really going to try to keep up with fairly often updates, but please bear with me if there is sometimes a week or two between chapters. I've got a lot on my plate, being both a full-time student and a part-time employee. I've also got some things going on healthwise that I'm sure you don't care about, so I'm going to just stop rambling and let you read the chapter. :) Enjoy!

* * *

_I can see there's so much to learn  
It's all so close, and yet so far  
I see myself as people see me  
I just know there's something bigger out there..._

_- Strangers Like Me, Phil Collins  
_

* * *

Booth opened his eyes, blinking hard and tearing his gaze from the ceiling. Sweets was leaned forward in his seat, elbows resting on his knees. He watched Booth with a look he had never really seen before, one he couldn't pinpoint—was it sympathy? Sadness? Understanding? Not wanting to stick around and find out, he stood from the couch and cracked his shoulder loudly.

"I'm leaving now," he said, walking towards the door.

"Agent Booth, we still have…" Sweets began, but whatever they still had was never known. Booth turned and gave Sweets a very dangerous look. He had never felt that the agent would really do him any bodily harm in the past, but in that moment he wasn't so sure.

"I'm leaving. Goodbye." With that Booth left, slamming the office door behind him.

Meanwhile, Brennan stood over an exam table in the Jeffersonian's Medico-Legal lab, squinting at a patterning of fractures on a victim's skull. She heard a sigh come from somewhere around her elbow, and looked down out of the corner of her eye. Jamal stood next to her, his thumbs hooked into his belt loops, face slack.

"What?" Brennan asked. He sighed again dramatically.

"I'm bored," he whined. "You said we was only gonna be here for a little while."

"We have to wait for Booth to get here before we can leave," Brennan explained, turning her gaze back to the skull. "He's coming with us."

"Does he have to?" Jamal asked.

"Yes, why?" she asked. Jamal gave her a dumbfounded look.

"Seriously?" he asked. "How you gonna even ask that question? You saw what he did to my dad."

"He was protecting you," Brennan said without emphasis, turning the skull and looking down into the cavity where the brain would normally reside.

"I don't need nobody to protect me," Jamal said stubbornly. Brennan couldn't help but know the feeling. Before their conversation could continue, Angela swiped her card and joined the two on the platform, smiling down at the boy who she had deemed 'adorable' upon first sight.

"Hey buddy," she said sweetly. He scowled at her.

"That ain't my name," he said. Angela raised her eyebrows.

"Hey _Jamal_," she corrected, looking to Brennan to see if she was going to reprimand the boy for his tone. When she realized that Brennan had effectively zoned out into Bone Land, she shrugged it off.

"I'm bored," he repeated, this time to Angela. "There's nothin' to do here."

"Are you kidding?" Angela said. "There's plenty to do here. You wanna come with me and look around the museum for a while?"

"I meant nothin' _fun_ to do," Jamal said.

"Museums are fun," Angela said.

"Museums ain't fun," Jamal argued. "They boring."

"Well," Angela said, thinking for a moment. "Do you want to come to my office and paint for a little while? I've got some extra paints and canvases tucked away."

"Uh-uh, art's for girls!" Jamal exclaimed. "I ain't no girl!"

"Art isn't just for girls," Angela said. "Some of the best artists in the world were men. Haven't you ever heard of Leonardo da Vinci? Michelangelo? Raphael? Donatello?"

"Man, now I know you clownin'," Jamal said, waving her off with his hand. "Those are ninja turtles!" Brennan smiled wryly at the skull, pretending not to pay attention, and Angela struggled not to laugh.

"The ninja turtles were named after Italian Renaissance artists," Angela explained. "Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, Raphael Sanzio, and Donato di Niccolo de Betto Bardi. They were some of the most influential Renaissance artists who ever lived."

"They must notta been _that_ important, 'cause I ain't never heard of 'em," Jamal argued. Angela made a face, and then lit up as if she had an idea.

"You're a boy," she said.

"No joke," Jamal said. Angela smiled.

"So you like to blow stuff up, right?" Jamal's face lit up, his white smile stretching across his thin face and ending in two deep dimples.

"Yeah!" he shouted. Angela put her hand on the boy's shoulder and steered him off the platform.

"Let me introduce you to Dr. Hodgins," Angela said. "I think you two are going to get along great." Brennan smiled as she watched the two of them—the big child and the small child—head into Hodgins's office, and rolled her eyes at the thought of what mayhem would ensue. For a while the lab was quiet; she found that without someone asking 'Can we go now?' every five minutes, she could get a lot more work done. After half an hour she heard a deep rumbling from the vicinity of Hodgins's office, and another few minutes later, a loud bang. Feeling that it was within her legal duties as a foster parent to make sure her Jamal didn't get blown to pieces in a lab experiment, she set the skull on the table and headed in that direction.

When she arrived in Hodgins's office, she found Hodgins, Angela, and Jamal flattened against the far wall, each sporting goggles and a lab coat, and identical grins of elation. The lab room itself was covered in thick white foam—it coated the countertops, dripped from the ceiling, and clung to their lab coats. Jamal smeared the foam off of the front of his goggles and looked over to Brennan standing in the doorway.

"That was so cool!" he yelled, jumping up and down in place. Brennan gave Hodgins a quizzical look, and he grinned.

"Hey Dr. B," he said while peeling the goggles off of his face. "We were just doing some, uh, hands-on science."

"I see," Brennan said, watching as the foam dissipated into water that now soaked the floor and counters, and dripped down on them. "What kind of experiments were those?"

"We blew up soda bottles!" Jamal exclaimed. "We put the stuff in and then put the other stuff in and BAM!" He gestured wildly with his arms, causing Angela to laugh.

"Like dad did with Parker?" Brennan asked. Hodgins turned his hand back and forth.

"Eh, kinda," he said. "See, your dad's experiments are cool and all, but they need more power."

"More power!" Jamal shouted. Hodgins grinned.

"Exactly," he said. "So, well, we took the soda bottles and emptied them out, and filled them with vinegar, right? And everyone knows the old vinegar and baking soda trick, kind of cool if you're five—"

"Pbbth," Jamal said, waving his hand. "No power."

"Right," Hodgins said. "So we added some, uh… activating agents to the solution."

"Power!" Jamal added.

"Yeah," Hodgins said, giving the boy a high five. "They're slow-acting, they take a minute. So we packed the baking soda in a water-soluble wrapping and put it in the vinegar and closed up the bottles…"

"And after about a minute…" Angela started.

"MORE POWER!" Jamal was positively yelling by that point. Brennan laughed, nodding.

"More power, right, I can see that," she said.

"Hey, sorry I—whoa, what happened?" Booth asked, poking his head into the room and noticing the remnants of their experiment.

"More power," Brennan explained. "Hodgins was showing Jamal some experiments while we waited for you. How was your appointment?"

"Let's not talk about it," Booth said brusquely. "So Dr. Hodgins showed you some cool stuff, huh?" Jamal gave Booth a wary look, then shrugged.

"Yeah," he said coolly. "It was tight. This stuff's a lot more fun than all that borin' mess we gotta do at school."

"Science rules, kid," Hodgins said, taking the small lab coat and goggles that Jamal shrugged off and handed to him. "School can make even the coolest stuff boring. Any time you want to do more experiments, just come on by."

"Yeah, man," Jamal said, bumping fists with Hodgins. "You a'ight."

"Thanks," Hodgins said. "You too." Jamal smiled up at him, then turned to Brennan.

"So we gonna go then?" he asked, and she nodded.

"Sure, let me get my things," she said. Jamal looked up at Booth.

"And you comin' too?" he asked.

"If it's okay with you," Booth said. Jamal gave him a long, hard look, then shrugged.

"I guess," he said, following Brennan out the door. Booth sighed, following him out.

"Good enough for me."

"What about these?" Booth asked, holding out a pair of jeans. They were in the children's section of the department store, a new experience for both Brennan and Jamal. Neither of them, from the way they continually stopped and stared at their surroundings, had ever spent much time in the children's department of a clothing store. Brennan had never had children, and Jamal, he thought, probably had never been given the opportunity to buy new clothes. Brennan had relinquished the shopping duty to Booth, perfectly happy to follow him around carrying their bags while he helped the boy decide on a new wardrobe.

"How much?" Jamal asked, for the five-thousandth time in the past hour. Booth checked the tag.

"Twenty-nine ninety-five," he read. Jamal shook his head.

"Nut uh," he said. "Next." Booth sighed, placing the pants back on the rack. Jamal had asked about the price of every single item they had picked up, and ninety percent of them he declined without even really looking at them. Brennan kept giving Booth confused looks, but declined to ask Jamal himself about the problem. Booth knew—when you had nothing, money was a big deal. Why spend thirty dollars on pants when thirty dollars could feed you for a week?

He also suspected that Jamal might have grown up the way he had—where, if he grabbed a pair of pants or a shirt off the rack that was too expensive, he ran the risk of a sound ass-kicking, or at least a screaming session about how selfish and irresponsible he was for even _thinking_about spending that kind of money on clothes. So when Jamal declined a pair of pants based on price alone, he understood, even if Brennan did not.

"These are on sale," Booth said, showing Jamal to a rack of t-shirts. While the boy browsed the rack, Booth stepped back to where Brennan stood, resting their bags on the floor.

"Why does he keep asking about the price?" Brennan asked. "I told him before we left that money wasn't a problem."

"It is for him," Booth said. Brennan furrowed her brows. "Look, he's probably never had anyone buy him anything nice before, alright? This is new for him. Where he came from, you can't just buy stuff without looking at the price."

"But he's only ten years old," Brennan said.

"Old enough," Booth replied stonily. "Didn't you ever have to pinch pennies growing up?" Brennan shook her head.

"No, money was never a problem for us when we were kids," Brennan said. "We had a decent house in a nice neighborhood. Before my parents left, they had me and Russ both enrolled in private school. I used to think it was because dad got paid well as a science teacher—obviously now I realize it was money stashed away from bank heists." Booth gave her a sidelong look, then shook his head. Money could be a problem in a lot of ways, he decided. It wasn't always from not having enough.

"I like this," Jamal said tentatively, holding out a shirt.

"Hey, that's nice," Booth said warmly. "Nice pick. Did you see anything else you wanted?" Jamal shook his head tentatively, then looked over to Brennan.

"I think I want to go… back to your house," he said. She heard him hesitate, as if catching himself before the h-word came out of his mouth. The h-word no foster kid said, because there could only ever be one, and they couldn't go back. They could say _house_, because they had plenty of those. But they never said the h-word. They never said home.

"Okay," Brennan said, looking to Booth quickly before nodding and taking the shirt from Jamal's grasp. "Let's pay for this, then we can go home."

* * *

**A/N:** Okay, so truthfully, not a whole lot happened here. But at the same time, I think several things are going on. Jamal is warming up to the squints, and learning that there is this whole world out there unlike the one he's been forced to live in for his entire life. Learning is fun, and he can have nice things and not have to worry about it.

By the way, kids checking price tags is so not out in left field... I grew up in a household where we had to pinch every single penny, and at ten years old I was definitely checking price tags. We shopped sales only, and usually my mom (a single parent) tried to find everything for my brother and I at thrift stores. I'm not ashamed - in fact, I'm so proud of my mom for being such an amazing provider for us. With the help of my grandfather and aunt, my brother and I both had our entire college pre-paid by the time we were in high school. Anything we wanted to do, whether it was being on the team or having lessons, my mom found a way to make it happen for us. So this is my shout-out to my mom, who will never read this and probably never realize just how much I appreciate what she did for us growing up - thanks, mom! :)

On a fic-related note, it's unclear whether or not Brennan actually went to public or private school. In "A Boy in the Tree", we find out that both Brennan and Zack went to private school, while Booth is a proud PS grad. In "The Bone that Blew", however, she said she went to public school and turned out fine, and Booth shouldn't worry about public school turning Parker's brain to jelly. (By the way, I am a public school grad and my brain didn't turn to jelly. :D) I decided for my own purposes, I am going to go with "Boy in the Tree" and make Brennan a private school kid. Also, out of curiosity, did anyone else make fun of private school kids as much as we did at my school? Because boy did we rail on them. :)

So what did you think? Like it? Hate it? Leave a review and let me know! I will try to update more quickly next time around.


	5. Lost Under the Surface

**A/N:** So I'm sensing a trend here... post several chapters in several days, wait a week and a half, then post several more chapters in several more days. :) I just have to take advantage of writing time whenever I have it, and today I did. The rest of this week is most likely going to be rather busy for me, though, so this might be it for a week or so. By the way, I'm glad you enjoyed the previous chapter even though next-to-nothing happened. This chapter is a lot more active... but you'll see that when you read it. With that said, enjoy!

* * *

_Please don't believe me when I say I'm okay  
Look a little deeper for the words that I can't say  
I'm too small to stand alone,  
I sure could use a friend  
Help me learn to trust someone again  
Don't leave me  
Please don't believe me..._

_- Please Don't Believe Me, Alan O'Day  
_

* * *

"I don't want to." Jamal articulated the words very clearly and very loudly on Monday morning, thin arms crossed over his chest, jaw set. Brennan stood in the doorway of the boy's bedroom with a hand on her hip, leaning against the other arm in the doorframe.

"You have to go to school," she said for the third or thirtieth or three-thousandth time that morning. It was hard to keep track anymore. He shook his head.

"Uh uh," was his response. Brennan took a few steps and sat on the edge of the boy's mattress, smoothing her robe and looking at him eye level.

"Why not?" she asked. Jamal sighed.

"'Cause it's school, duh," he said. She shook her head.

"If you can't give me a logical reason why you shouldn't go to school, you'll have to go," she said.

"What's logical?" Jamal asked.

"It means something that makes sense," Brennan replied. Jamal threw his hands up.

"What you don't understand about I don't wanna go to school? Makes damn fine sense to me!" he said, raising his brows at her.

"Don't say damn," Brennan said, seemingly as a reflex now. She had said that fill-in-the-blank phrase, _Don't say ______, so many times over the weekend that she didn't really even think about it anymore.

"I'm'a say _damn_ if I wanna, and I'm _not_ gonna go to school," Jamal said with a tone of finality. Brennan sighed, agitated.

"No, you're not, and yes, you are," she responded. "Just because you don't want to, isn't a good reason not to go."

"Sound like a good reason to me," Jamal said.

"Well, it's not," Brennan said. "Sometimes I didn't want to get up and go to school as a kid, but I had to anyway."

"Sucks to be you," Jamal said. "I ain't goin'." Brennan gritted her teeth, feeling the end of her rope draw frighteningly close.

"You're going to school, Jamal," she said. "We're zoned for a very nice elementary school here, the teachers are excellent and the school consistently ranks in the top of the district for—"

"I don't care!" Jamal shouted. "I'm not goin'! I don't care 'bout the teachers or the kids or nothin', I don't care. I'm not goin'." Brennan chewed on the inside of her cheek, quelling her anger. She knew, deep down, why he was being difficult.

"Jamal," she said quietly, suppressing the urge to scream his name across the room as loudly as possible. "I know why you don't want to go to school."

"Yeah, bet," Jamal said, leaning in the corner of the room against the wall and staring down at his sock feet.

"I do," Brennan said. "I know this is difficult for you. It's a new school, with new teachers and kids you've never met before. You're scared."

"I ain't scared!" Jamal said, jumping up. "I ain't scared of nothin'."

"I think you are," Brennan said. "I think you're afraid none of the other kids will like you, or that maybe they'll know you're… that you're a foster kid and won't want to be friends with you. Or maybe the teachers will treat you differently because…"

"You're wrong," Jamal said, glaring. "I'm not."

"It's okay if you are, you know," Brennan offered. He set his jaw and was quiet, the two of them staring at each other from across the room. Suddenly he snatched his shoes up off the floor, sitting at his desk chair and shoving his feet into them without bothering to undo the laces.

"Scared, puh," he said dismissively, yanking back the tongues of the high tops and forcing his heel down into the bottom. "I ain't scared. And I'm'a show you, I'm'a pick up this backpack and walk my sorry ass down to the bus stop and go to your stupid school and show you, I ain't scared." He pulled one strap of the backpack over his shoulder and stood up, eyes still narrowed at her.

"Thank you, Jamal," Brennan said kindly, walking behind him as he left the room.

"Thank you nothin'," he said crabbily. "I ain't doin' nothin' for you, Doc, I'm just showin' you that I ain't scared."

"That's fine," Brennan said. "Don't forget your lunch." He paused on his way towards the door.

"My what?" he asked. Brennan motioned towards the counter, where a brown paper lunch bag stood upright, weighed down by its contents.

"Your lunch," she said. "I made you lunch. I don't really know what you like for lunch so I just made a turkey sandwich and some…" Before she could finish her sentence, the boy had snatched the bag from the counter and bolted, coat flapping behind him as he pealed out, allowing the heavy door to slam behind him. Brennan sighed, and turned her attention to her cold coffee in his absence.

oOoOoOoOo

Booth drummed his fingers against the chair's smooth, curving wood armrest. The thumps were rhythmic and satisfying, and increased in intensity every time he looked up into Sweets's calm, unassuming gaze. The calmer and more pleasant he got, the angrier it made Booth feel, for a reason he could not pin.

"Agent Booth," Sweets began, clicking his pen and resting one ankle on the opposite knee like he so often did. His socks were plain and black—the same kind of socks he wore every day. Booth noticed those kinds of things; that was his job, to be observant of people. Brennan may think she was the people-watcher, with all her anthropological whatever, but Booth was the real watchdog.

He doubted if she could list off the different types of ties Sweets wore in their meetings, or the way he held his pen up by his face when he was trying to gauge Booth's feelings and responses. When the pen came down, it meant Sweets thought he knew something—Booth could easily make that pen rise back towards his face with something as small as an inclination of his chin, or an eyebrow movement. Sometimes it was a game—how many times in one session he could throw Sweets off. In these sessions, though, he was focused on other things.

"Yeah?" Booth asked when Sweets did not continue. Sweets brought the pen up by his chin, clicking it again. Booth turned his head slightly, trying to wipe all hints of emotion from his face. _Tabula rasa_; a blank slate.

"Well, it's been three days since our last visit," Sweets said. "Last time we discussed—"

"I remember," Booth said curtly, cutting him off. Sweets clicked the pen again. If he didn't stop, Booth was going to come across that coffee table between them and snap that thing in two. Whether _that thing_ meant the pen or Sweets, he couldn't be sure.

"You were seven at the time, is that right?" Sweets asked. Booth nodded, but didn't offer anything else. Sweets clicked the pen again.

"Stop it," Booth growled. Sweets looked up.

"Stop what?" he asked.

"Clicking that stupid pen," Booth replied. "It's driving me nuts."

"You're on edge, Agent Booth," Sweets said calmly. His calm demeanor aggravated Booth even further. "Is it the pen bothering you, or is it your lack of control over the environment?"

"Don't psychoanalyze me, kid. Sometimes a pen is just a pen, and it's gonna be a pen out the damn window if you don't stop clicking it," Booth said, crossing his arms. Sweets smiled—_Oh how I would love to wipe that stupid grin off his stupid face_, Booth thought angrily—and set the pen down on the table.

"Fine," Sweets said, putting both feet on the ground and leaning in on his knees, fingertips touching lightly. "Anyway, pens aside, control has always been an issue in your life, hasn't it?"

"What's that s'posed to mean?" Booth asked.

"It means that your father's alcoholism left you, as a child, without any sense of control in your life. People in your situation—"

"And what situation is that?" Booth challenged.

"Well, children of alcoholic parents. ACoA's, in your case. Adult Children of Alcoholics."

"So what, you think you can psycho-head-shrink me and put me into some stupid category with everyone else?" Booth asked. Sweets shook his head.

"No, Agent Booth. I'm simply stating that children who grow up in alcoholic households tend to exhibit some of the same psychological symptoms as adults. Their childhood home was ruled by chaos, unpredictability, and illogicality. Often times, as was your case, violence is also a major part of the home. That leaves a lasting impression on a child."

"Right," Booth said dismissively.

"You're a hero, Agent Booth," Sweets said.

"What, now you're gonna try to flatter me?" Booth asked. Sweets smiled.

"No, that's not what I mean. There are four broad roles that children of alcoholics fall under. The hero, the adjuster, the placater, and the scapegoat. The hero is the one who takes all the responsibility on their shoulders, who takes it upon themselves to make sure the family looks 'normal' to outsiders. They take responsibility for everything that happens, inside and outside of the home, whether or not it's actually their yoke to bear.

"Your brother, on the other hand, from what I've observed acts like a typical scapegoat. They're the trouble kids in the family. They act out and often fall into their own patterns of drug and alcohol abuse, as a way of expressing their anger. Heroes don't get angry—not at anyone else, anyway. Heroes get angry with themselves for not being able to make everything perfect. Scapegoats take that anger and project it outward, into their actions. Sound about right?" Booth didn't respond, but set his jaw, staring at the far wall.

"You don't have to answer me, Agent Booth, but you have to understand. Your father's alcoholism had a profound impact on you, on you and Jared both. It influences your thoughts and actions every day, and until you square off with that, it's going to keep coming back to haunt you."

oOoOoOoOo

"Mom, stop," Seeley said, squirming in his seat on the kitchen counter. His father had left for work before they awoke; he probably didn't remember the night before. His mother probably made him coffee, black, and two sandwiches to take for lunch. She probably kissed him on the cheek as he walked out the door—maybe it was still scruffy from the last long night. He would shave when he got to the shop, before he opened it up. He would make himself presentable to the world.

"Just a little more," his mom said, holding his chin with one hand and dabbing concealer under his left eye with the other. It was still puffy—no amount of make-up could cover that—but it didn't shine dark purple like it had before. Now it was only a dull, dark mark on the little boy's face—only a remnant.

"Okay, almost done," she said, reaching for the powder. Seeley groaned, trying to jump off the ledge of the counter before she could cake his face with the stuff. She grabbed his arm and, with the strength that always amazed him, held him put.

"Mo-om," he whined as she tapped the pouf against the compact, shaking off the loose make-up. She patted it along his under-eye and cheek, blending it out towards his hairline in gentle strokes. She had always been good at her job, writing jingles for commercials, but her real skill was make-up artistry—in the way movie artists could create bruises, cuts, and mutations from nothing, she could cover up even the darkest black eye and make it disappear. After all, practice makes perfect.

"Alright," she said, standing back and admiring her handiwork. She could still detect a dark shadow beneath his eye, but perhaps to those who did not know, it would go unnoticed. "You can go now, don't be late!" Seeley jumped off the counter and beelined towards the door, grabbing his coat and backpack off the hanger.

"Aren't you forgetting something?" his mom asked. He smiled, trotting back across the living room to bestow a kiss upon her cheek. She pecked his forehead and ruffled his hair. He smiled, she smiled, and he left, carefully skipping cracks in the cement the whole way to school.

That afternoon at recess, squashed between math and spelling, a vicious wall ball tournament raged on. Nearly all of the boys in Mrs. Dougherty's fourth grade class were involved in some way, including Seeley Booth. He wasn't the fastest kid, but he made up for it by never dropping the ball. He also had a mean pitching arm—if some poor sap fumbled the tennis ball anywhere near him, that kid was toast.

"Don't drop it," Mark Foster heckled as Seeley snatched the ball out of the air, turning on his heel before hurling it at the side wall of Mr. Finke's fifth grade classroom. The ball sailed gracefully through the air, pinging off the brick and rebounding towards the crowd. Seeley smiled smugly—next time he got the ball, he'd be sure to pelt it in Mark's direction. Play continued on for a while like that, with Seeley occasionally aiming the ball at Mark's back. It was the best rule of the game, by far.

"Stop!" Mark shouted, fumbling the tennis ball but finally securing it in his hands. Seeley sneered—he and Mark disliked each other on a very fundamental basis. Mark's family was rich, Seeley's wasn't. Mark's family got skybox seats to the Phillies games every weekend, and hobnobbed (and used words like hobnobbed) with the coaches and players afterwards. Seeley was lucky if he could toss his ball down into the dugout and retrieve it with a few signatures.

But Seeley had what Mark didn't, too—he was bigger, stronger, and always got picked first for teams. Plus Seeley's family was Catholic and Mark's were Protestant, which the boys had no understanding of aside from that it meant Seeley couldn't eat hamburgers on Friday, and Mark couldn't recite a Hail Mary if his immortal soul depended on it. So fundamentally, they were at odds, and they vented those pent-up little boy frustrations in the only arena they had.

"Whacha gonna do about it?" Seeley taunted, holding his arms out. Mark responded wordlessly—he pelted Seeley square in the chest with the tennis ball. Before he could register the action, the ball hit the gravel at his feet, and all hell broke loose.

Seeley bolted for the brick wall, which seemed much farther away than before. His opponents scrambled for the ball—if one of them could pick it up and hit the wall, or Seeley, before he touched the wall, he'd be out. Being out wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, but letting Mark Foster have the satisfaction of being the one who got him out… it was more than his nine-year-old ego could handle.

He was closing in on the wall, and turned to evaluate his enemy's progress. He smiled when he saw them shoving each other out of the way, each fighting to be the one to grab the ball and get him out. Seeley almost always won—it was a bragging right to get him out of the game. If things went his way, none of them would get to enjoy that right.

He turned back towards his destination, only to realize it was much closer than he'd anticipated. He tried to slow himself down, but the soles of his shoes slid on the loose gravel underfoot, causing him to lurch forward towards the wall. He hit it face-first, with enough force that he bounced backwards and fell on his back, eyes flashing with little white stars.

When his vision had cleared, he opened his eyes and saw a circle of spectators huddled around him, staring down with wide eyes. Meanwhile, Mark Foster had scooped the ball up off the ground and wandered lazily over to where Seeley lay, smirking.

"Gotcha," he said as he dropped the ball onto the boy's abdomen.

"Hey dummy," Seeley spat. "I already touched the wall."

"Face-plants don't count," Mark replied. Seeley sat up, his head spinning.

"Says who?" he challenged.

"Says me!" Mark replied, puffing out his small chest.

"You an' what army?" Seeley asked, now risen to his feet and standing quite a few inches over Mark.

"Me an' this army!" Mark lunged towards him, fists flying, and Seeley was more than happy to return the favor. Soon both boys were wrestling on the ground, leaves and bits of gravel flung about as a circle of children cheered and hollered. Before long a passing teacher heard the commotion and broke up the fight, verbally reprimanding the boys before sending them both off to the nurse's office.

"Fighting? Seeley, that's not like you," Nurse Himmel commented as she sat the boy up on a stool and took a closer look at the cut across his cheek. It wasn't from the fight with Mark, but rather, the one with the wall.

"He started it," Seeley maintained, wincing as the nurse swabbed a cotton ball dipped in alcohol across the cut.

"And apparently you finished it, you nearly broke his nose," Nurse Himmel chastised, her brows furrowing as she looked down at the peachy residue on the cotton ball. "Seeley, are you wearing make-up?"

"What?" he asked in a panicked tone. Nurse Himmel grabbed another cotton ball and dunked it in alcohol, scrubbing his cheek with it. As the dark bruise revealed itself, he heard her breath catch in her chest.

"Oh my," was all she said, gingerly wiping away at the area and revealing more and more of the damage. When she was done, she had revealed a very badly hurt little boy who refused to look her in the eye. "Seeley, what happened?"

"I got in a fight," he said.

"With who?" she asked cautiously.

"My brother," he said without pause, perfectly rehearsed.

"Little Jared? But he's only seven," Nurse Himmel pointed out. "How could he have done that?"

"He pushed me… into a… uh… table," Seeley said, willing the words to come to him. "Yeah, that's it! He pushed me, right into the corner of the coffee table, wham. Gave me a big ol' shiner."

"I see," Nurse Himmel said, biting her bottom lip and shaking her head slightly. "Well, go on Seeley. The principal gave me this note for you; your parents have to sign it and you have to bring it back tomorrow. Okay?" He nodded as she pinned the note to the front of his jacket, sending him back to class.

Later that afternoon, Seeley dragged his feet on the way to his father's barbershop. He was afraid of what his dad would say, but he knew it was better to tell him in public than to wait until they were in the privacy of their own home. This way, his dad still had a few hours to cool off before he got home. Also, he wouldn't be drinking.

"There's my boy!" his dad called out when Seeley walked through the front door, dropping his backpack on the floor and running across the tall, narrow shop to hug his father.

"That ain't Seeley," his father's friend argued. "He's too big!"

"I tell ya, every time I turn around this kid's a foot taller," his dad boasted, squeezing his shoulder. "Hey Seel, what's that note you got there?"

"I uh… I got in a fight, dad," Seeley said quietly, unpinning the note and handing it to his father. His dad pulled the reading glasses out of his pocket and placed them on the bridge of his broad nose, looking down at the principal's tidy script.

"I see," his father said slowly. "Did you start it?"

"No!" Seeley nearly shouted, not realizing his volume. "No sir. Mark Foster did, he started it an' I just—"

"He finished it!" his father's friend shouted, leaning over from the chair he occupied and slapping Seeley on the back. "Didja win, kid?"

"Yeah," Seeley said, nodding.

"Yeesh, if you won, I'd hate to see what the kid who lost looks like," his dad said, kneeling down and lifting Seeley's face slightly to better look at him. "That's one helluva shiner, kid."

"Yeah," Seeley said, eyes flicking from his father's kind face, to his friend's bright smile, back to his father. He couldn't tell whether it was a front, or if his dad genuinely didn't remember the previous night. He could never tell with him.

"Well, I'm proudaya, son," his dad said, rising and ruffling his hair. "This kid's a Booth through-and-through, he finishes his fights!" The men joked and laughed amongst themselves, sharing stories from their own long-lost youths, and Seeley gently touched the bruise on his face. Booth men certainly finished their fights.

* * *

**A/N:** A few chapter-related notes... first of all, all of the information about ACoA's is straight from a phamplet titled, aptly enough, "Adult Children of Alcoholics." Because I am a big fan of giving credit where credit is due, the pertinent information gleaned from this pamphlet can be sourced to the books _It Will Never Happen to Me_ by Claudia Black, and _Safe Passage: Recovery for Adult Chidren of Alcoholics_ by Stephanie Brown.

Also, I would like to point out that you guys are so much smarter than me. xD It didn't even occur to me while writing the last chapter, that it would have been possible for Brennan to attend both public _and_ private school. But most of you were kind enough to point that out to me, which I am grateful for. I had a definite facepalm moment when I read that first comment that enlightened me to that possible scenario... oy. So anyway, thanks for helping me with that little nugget of possibility. :)

Oh, and on a third and much less important but equally entertaining note... wall ball is the best friggin game ever. Does anyone else remember playing this on the playground? If you've never played wall ball, please do yourself and humanity a favor and look up the rules of the game online, collect a few friends and a tennis ball, and go play. It's the best thing you'll ever do for yourself.

Okay, I'm really done rambling now. What did you think about this chapter? Leave me a review and let me know!


	6. I'll Stand By You

**A/N:** Oh man, what an insane two weeks. I was sidelined for something like 9 or 10 days with a really bad case of the flu, and wasn't even able to get out of bed, much less do anything productive. Then, someone close to me was in and out of jail, on the day before my birthday. Happy birthday to me? Then I made the long-coming decision to quit my job, so I'm now unemployed and looking for another job. Currently I'm trying to catch up in all of my classes, but I had to take a break for sanity's sake, and during that break I wrote another chapter for this. It's another one of those chapters where not much happens, but it's setting the tone for "Part II" of the fic. Mentally I have this fic divided into four parts, and we just passed through the first one. The organization won't make sense to you until the end, but now I know where exactly I'm going with the storyline and eventually you'll see what I mean.

Anyway, enough babbling... enjoy! And I'll try to update again this week, after I finally get caught up with my readings. That's my reward to myself. :)

* * *

_And now we're grown up orphans  
That never knew their names  
We don't belong to no one  
That's a shame  
But if you could hide beside me  
Maybe for a while  
And I won't tell no one your name_

_- Name, The Goo Goo Dolls  
_

* * *

An hour later, lying on his couch, his father's old words still rang through his head. _Booth men finish their fights._ He had stormed out of Sweets's office ten minutes before the session ended, driving haphazardly across town in a seething rage. Just thinking about it made his blood boil, but actually verbalizing the memories… it was like breathing them into life. He sighed loudly, sagging into the old cushions with an incredible weight not his own. When the doorbell rang, he found it difficult to force himself to his feet.

"Dad!" Parker yelled when his father opened the door, throwing himself around his middle. Booth patted his son on the back absent-mindedly, not listening as the boy rambled. Rebecca's gaze caught his, and her brows knitted together cautiously.

"Are you alright?" she asked quietly as Parker breezed past them, throwing his belongings on the floor in his bedroom. Booth cleared his throat and nodded, rubbing his hand over his hair.

"I'm fine," he said unconvincingly. "It's just work, is all." Rebecca nodded, not understanding fully the difficulties of working with murderers but wanting to be sympathetic nonetheless.

"Okay," she said, leaving the subject alone. She'd known Booth long enough to know when to just let it lie. "Are you up to this weekend?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine," Booth said, waving her off. "You and Cap—Brent, you guys go have a good time."

"We're going to the Daytona five-hundred, how much fun do you think I'm going to have?" Rebecca asked in a dark tone, and Booth couldn't help but chuckle.

"Well, you can send me one of those cheesy _Wish you were here in sunny Florida_ postcards, how about that?" he said, and Rebecca broke into a relieved smile. He was going to be okay.

"I might be able to swing that," Rebecca said, looking over Booth's shoulder as their son flipped on the television, sinking comfortably into the couch. "We should be back late Sunday, but you might have to take Parker to school on Monday morning. I'll let you know." Booth nodded and Rebecca left, kissing Parker on the cheek and ruffling his hair before she went.

"Hey dad," Parker asked later that evening as the two of them loafed around in their boxers, eating pizza straight out of the box. Booth raised his eyebrows.

"Huh?" he asked. Parker seemed to shift his weight in his seat before continuing.

"Is fighting bad?" he asked. Booth bit his lip.

"It depends," he finally said, after careful consideration. "What kind of fighting?"

"Like, if someone says something mean and you get in a fight," Parker elaborated. "Is that bad?"

"Parker, you talk with your mouth, not your fists," Booth said. "Just because someone makes you mad, doesn't mean you can hit them. Did you get in a fight with someone at school?" Parker mumbled something that sounded affirmative.

"Who was it?" Booth asked.

"Colin," Parker answered.

"And what did he say to you?"

"Nothin'," Parker said. "But he called Aleisha a… a bad word."

"Oh?" Booth said, letting his pizza hang half-way between the box and his mouth. Parker nodded.

"I can't say what he said," Parker said. "But it was really mean, dad. He made her cry." Booth set his pizza down, lacing his fingers over his abdomen and cocking his head slightly as he surveyed his son.

"So after he said the bad word to Aleisha, that's when you hit him?" Booth asked. Parker shook his head.

"Well, no," he said. "First I told him to take it back, and he wouldn't. Then I hit him." Booth repressed the urge to smile, reaching out and putting his hand on Parker's bare shoulder.

"Okay," he said. "Hitting people is bad, you know that. But sometimes you do bad things for good reasons. You shouldn't have hit Colin, but you did it for a good reason, so I'm not mad at you. But next time, just let the teacher do the punishing, okay?" Parker nodded, looking relieved.

"So I'm not in trouble?" he asked. Booth shook his head.

"No, you're not," he affirmed. "I'm proud of you for sticking up for your friend, I just don't like the way you did it. But you still did the right thing. Do you understand?"

"That's what mom said," Parker said.

"What about Brent?" Booth asked. Parker made a face.

"He said hitting's always wrong and you shouldn't do it no matter what," Parker recited boredly. "He said even if someone hits you, you shouldn't hit 'em back."

"Well Brent's an idiot," Booth slipped before he could control himself. Parker gave him a wide-eyed look, and he sighed.

"I didn't mean that," Booth said.

"Then why'd you say it?" Parker countered.

"Brent's a good guy," Booth said. "There's just some things we don't agree on. When it comes to fighting… well, you know my rule."

"Never start it, always finish it," Parker said proudly. Booth nodded.

"That's right," he said. "Booth men always…" He trailed off, realizing what he was about to say.

"Booth men always what, dad?" Parker asked. Booth tossed the piece of pizza back into the box, suddenly feeling nauseous.

"They do the right thing, Parker," Booth finally said. "They always do the right thing."

"Dr. Brennan, I'm glad you came," the tall, thin woman said tartly. Her grey hair was slicked back into a bun, and the way her narrow frames sat on the end of her nose gave Brennan the sense that she was being perpetually looked down upon. This was not actually possible, since Brennan was at least an inch taller than this woman, but she couldn't shake the feeling nonetheless.

"Of course," Brennan replied.

"Please, sit down," the woman said, offering her a seat on the opposite side of her desk. Brennan took it, but the woman did not sit. Instead, she walked along the far edge of her desk as she spoke.

"I'm Dr. Randall, the principal here at Eaton elementary," Mrs. Randall introduced. "We spoke earlier on the phone." Brennan nodded.

"I remember," she said. "Is Jamal in trouble?" Dr. Randall pursed her lips, drawing her face even more tight, if that was possible.

"You're Jamal's foster mother, correct?" Dr. Randall asked. Brennan nodded.

"He's been with me for about a week," Brennan said.

"And how is he adjusting?" Dr. Randall asked. Brennan shrugged.

"He's doing alright," Brennan said. "Being in the foster care system is difficult."

"I understand," Dr. Randall said. "I took the liberty of looking up Jamal's educational background. Apparently he attended Birney elementary, in the eighth ward. Is that correct?" Brennan nodded.

"He lived in the eighth ward, yes," she responded. Dr. Randall didn't seem to notice if she had said anything at all.

"His attendance record was very poor, Dr. Brennan, to the point that truancy officers visited his home four times over the course of the past school year. Were you aware of this?"

"I had a feeling," Brennan said, hating the word _feeling_ for its subjectivity and the way it fell off of her tongue like a lead weight.

"My point," Dr. Randall said, finally sitting down and facing Brennan, "is that Jamal is far behind where we believe a fourth grade boy should be. _Far_ behind, Dr. Brennan. He met today with one of our educational psychologists for a general assessment, and his reading scored on a second grade level. His math was not much better."

"Considering that his access to education has been abysmal at best, that's not really surprising," Brennan defended. Dr. Randall pursed her lips again.

"We believe it would be in Jamal's best interest to place him in a class where the curriculum would be better suited to his academic progress," Dr. Randall said.

"And where would that be?" Brennan asked.

"Third grade," Dr. Randall said. "We have a special education department that can work with Jamal and get him up to speed, but it's going to take some time. Until then, we believe he would be better suited to a less rigorous academic environment."

"Dr. Randall, Jamal's turning eleven next month," Brennan pointed out. "He's already been held back a year, he should be in fifth grade. The average age of a third grader is what, eight? Don't you think it would be demoralizing to place an eleven-year-old boy in a class full of eight-year-old children? That seems like much more of a detriment than an aide."

"I thought you might react badly to the suggestion," Dr. Randall said brusquely. Brennan flared.

"I don't believe my reaction is out of line given what you're suggesting for Jamal," Brennan said.

"I am only suggesting a course of action that would best benefit the child," Dr. Randall insisted. "As Jamal's foster mother, you should be concerned with what will best suit his needs, not your own particular feelings about the situation." Brennan's jaw clenched—never in her life had she been accused of letting her feelings inhibit her ability to objectively assess a situation, and she wouldn't stand for it today.

"Well, Dr. Randall, I don't believe the course of action you are suggesting would be in any way beneficial to Jamal," Brennan said. "In fact, I believe you are assessing the situation not as an educator but as a bureaucrat, making assumptions based on a set of test scores that may or may not be an accurate reflection of the child's intelligence and ability."

"Facts are facts, Dr. Brennan," Dr. Randall said flatly. "They are not up for interpretation."

"Actually, all statistical facts are up for interpretation. That's the entire point of scientific inquiry, to collect data and interpret it objectively." Dr. Randall gave her a sour look.

"This is not a science experiment, this is a little boy who can't read, write, or perform arithmetic on grade level. I will not allow him to suffer in a fourth grade classroom where the material is entirely over his head, when he could find success in a third grade setting. You have to be rational about this."

"Maybe if your school was able or willing to give Jamal the extra attention he needs to catch up, he wouldn't have to suffer," Brennan snapped.

"Well if you can find an educational facility that is willing to pour resources into a child who simply cannot keep up, by all means perhaps you should place him there instead," Dr. Randall huffed. "Because as long as Jamal is at my school, he will be in the third grade."

"Then I guess I will just have to find a more suitable learning environment for him," Brennan said crisply, rising from her seat. Dr. Randall watched Brennan open-mouthed as she left the office, resisting the urge to slam the door behind her.

In the time she had spent in the principal's office, Jamal had been summoned to the front desk and was waiting for her there, slouched back in an uncomfortably lobby chair. When he saw her storm out of the office his brows quirked, and he struggled to keep up with her fast, irritated strides as they crossed the parking lot.

"Did you get in a fight with the principal?" Jamal asked from the back seat after Brennan had taken a few deep, relaxing breaths.

"We had a difference of opinion," Brennan said. "Jamal, do you like that school?" He made a face.

"Hell no," he replied, then quickly corrected himself. "I mean, no."

"Would you like to look at some other schools?" Jamal nodded.

"Uh huh," he said. "I wanna go somewhere they don't treat me stupid. They put me in class with a bunch of third grade babies!"

"You're not going to be in third grade," Brennan said resolutely.

"Good," Jamal said. "I'm not stupid."

"I know," Brennan said, turning on the road that would lead them home.

* * *

**A/N:** Again, I know not a whole lot happened here... but at the same time, it did. Booth is having to consolidate his father's messed up brand of parenting with his own, and show Parker right from wrong when he isn't even sure about what _he_ knows. Now that Sweets is making him question the very underlying facets of his personality and how they stem from his father's alcoholism, he has to wonder, what if he's passing on negative traits to Parker without even realizing they're negative? What if he's teaching his son to be violent without even knowing it? Where is the line, and how do you know you haven't already crossed it?

And on the flip side, there's Brennan having to make important parental decisions for Jamal without having any kind of experience or know-how. But it doesn't matter, because whatever she lacks in experience she makes up for with an intuitive momma-bear instinct. She has to go with her gut and take a stand for Jamal when no one else will, and hope that she's doing the right thing. When you're a parent, you don't get second changes - you make a decision for your child and if it's the wrong one, then you've screwed up and the kid has to live with the consequences. Just as hard as Booth is trying not to screw up Parker, Brennan is trying to jump into Jamal's life and undo the damage that's already been done.

Anyway, what did you think? Like it, hate it, bored by it? Leave a review and let me know. :)


	7. The Baffled King Composing Hallelujah

**A/N:** Would you lookit that, I didn't wait 2 weeks this time. :) I'm still not caught up with my school readings but I don't care, I've been thinking about this chapter all week and I wanted to write it so I did. There are worse ways to indulge one's self, right? This chapter is the longest one I've written for this fic so far, because it could really be broken into two chapters - one in the present, one in the past. I decided arbitrarily to keep them as one chapter, mostly because I had already written it that way so I figured there was no real reason to split them up. It's not insufferably long, just longer than most. Most of the chapters of _Foster Child_ were about this length, though, so it's nothing you haven't endured before. You might even enjoy it... I hope so, anyway.

* * *

_Baby, I've been here before  
I've seen this room and I've walked this floor  
I used to live alone before I knew you  
And I've seen your flag on the marble arch,  
and love is not a victory march  
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah..._

* * *

When Booth's phone rang the next morning, he had expected it to be Rebecca calling to tell him that they'd arrived in Florida unscathed. He was surprised, though not very, when he saw Brennan's name on the caller ID. If it wasn't going to be Rebecca, it would be Bones.

"Hurro?" he asked through a mouth full of Frosted Flakes.

"Hey… what are you eating?" Brennan asked. He could hear music in the background—rap from the sound of the bass—and he smiled. Milk dribbled down his chin and he clumsily reached for a napkin off of the table, mopping his face as he answered.

"Cereal," he responded after he swallowed. "You know, what normal people eat for breakfast."

"I don't know why you think oatmeal is so abnormal," Brennan defended.

"Because only old people eat oatmeal," Booth replied. He heard Brennan scoff across the line. He smiled again. "So what's up?"

"Well, I was wondering what you and Parker are doing today," Brennan asked, knowing he had his son for the weekend.

"Nothing planned," Booth said. "He's been watching cartoons all morning, that's all. Why, what are you thinking?"

"Well," Brennan said, turning the music down slightly as a new song came on, one much louder than the previous. Jamal scowled from the back seat, which she ignored. "I was wondering if you would look over some brochures with me."

"Brochures? For what?" Booth asked.

"Schools," she replied. "I don't like that public school."

"I thought you said it was the best public school in D.C.," Booth reminded.

"Well, I was wrong," Brennan said. Booth coughed, nearly choking on his cornflakes out of sheer surprise. She never said the W word, not applied to herself anyway. Other people were wrong rather often, but if she was admitting that her own judgment had been incorrect, that crackling sound he heard earlier must've been hell freezing underfoot.

"Oh," Booth said, over his shock and now curious to know what had happened to change her mind. "Well sure, you guys can come by whenever."

"Are you dressed?" she asked. Booth felt his face flush, caught off guard by the question. He cleared his throat uncomfortably but before he could respond, he heard a loud knock at the door. He smiled, hanging up the phone and answering the door.

"What if I had said no?" was his greeting to the two of them as they crossed the threshold into his apartment, Brennan kicking her shoes off at the door and nonverbally encouraging Jamal to do the same.

"Then we would have waited," Brennan responded, setting the manila folder in her grasp on the kitchen table next to Booth's bowl of cereal. It was a lab folder, but it said "POTENTIAL SCHOOLS" in her familiar, tidy script across the tab. He rolled his eyes—leave it to her to micro-organize every piece of paper that came into her possession.

"Hey Bones," Parker greeted, waving from his sprawled out position on the couch. Jamal finally took notice of Parker, jutting his chin out slightly as he sized up the small boy.

"Hey Parker," Brennan responded, walking to Jamal's side. Her hand hovered over his shoulder, then she seemed to think better of the action and placed the hand on her hip instead. "This is Jamal. Jamal, this is Parker."

"Hey," Parker said, sitting up, his short legs dangling over the edge of the couch.

"Hey," Jamal said, in neither an aggressive nor accepting way. He hadn't decided if he liked the boy yet or not—Booth had noticed that Jamal, not unlike Brennan, had a way of keeping his feelings about someone neutral if not slightly defensive until forming a more complete opinion about them. Though the boy was more aggressive in his stance, his mental process was the same as hers—guard yourself and size up your opponent. Let them make the first move.

"You wanna watch TV?" Parker asked. Jamal looked up at Brennan, who shrugged back.

"I hear there's cartoons on," Brennan offered. "Boys like cartoons, right?"

"It's Power Rangers, not cartoons," Parker corrected. Jamal's face lit up.

"Aw, yeah!" he shouted, hurtling himself onto the couch. Brennan smiled and Booth grabbed her elbow, leading her into his small eat-in kitchen.

"They seem to be getting along," Brennan observed as they sat at the small table, Booth spooning up the last of his milk. He nodded, this time swallowing before opening his mouth.

"Boys are boys," he said. "They usually like the same things. Sports, Power Rangers, breaking stuff. They're not like girls, all about the drama."

"Excuse me," Brennan said. "Girls are not 'all about drama'."

"Oh yes they are," Booth argued. "Girls of all ages, that's all they do is start fights and take sides. Boys aren't like that—boys are chill."

"I would hardly call that boy _chill_," Brennan said in a low voice. "Everything with him is a fight. He yells no matter what you say to him. I don't know what to do about it."

"Well, he's had a rough time," Booth defended. "And his home life before wasn't exactly calm and quiet. Give him some time, he'll settle down."

"I hope so," Brennan said. "He just doesn't seem happy."

"Were you happy when you first moved into someone else's house?" Booth asked. Brennan fingered the edge of the manila folder, bending one of the corners over.

"No," she answered with a sigh. "No, I wasn't. It was hard, to be in someone else's home, not knowing the rules or the expectations. Feeling like you don't belong, like every step you take is wrong, is hard, especially for a child." She looked up and saw that Booth was leaned back in his chair, head tilted slightly to the side as he gave her an odd look. She couldn't decide if it was pity, or possibly understanding.

"Yeah," he finally said, clearing his throat and standing. "Yeah, that must have been really hard." He walked across the kitchen and rinsed out the bowl, leaving it in the sink. He shut his eyes briefly but deliberately—if she hadn't been watching him intensely, she would have missed it. It was only a moment, but he took it, inhaling deeply and letting it go. He turned around abruptly and clapped his hands together, breaking the silence.

"Alright, let's look at those brochures," he said, dragging his chair across the linoleum so that it was next to hers. She opened the folder and drew out a handful of colorful brochures, each bright and inviting. Together like that, crouched over school info-packets with their bare feet on the worn linoleum, she felt a sudden intimacy. Not a sexual arousal or a romantic pang, but just an affection; a warmth that she rarely felt with other people. She couldn't help smiling as she lay all of the brochures out on the table in rows, nearly covering its surface.

"This one has a strong science curriculum," Brennan pointed out as she flipped through one. "They have two fully-equipped science labs, look."

"Wow," Booth said. "That looks like _your_ lab."

"It is nice," she said, adding it to the 'maybe' pile. They had spent the past half hour narrowing down the fifteen or so brochures into 'maybe' and 'no' piles. With Booth's help she had eliminated about ten schools from the running so far, based mostly on objective reasoning, but not entirely.

"Not this one," Booth had said about one, tossing it into the 'no' pile.

"Why not?" Brennan asked.

"The flyer, it sucks," Booth said.

"What? That's not a good reason," Brennan argued.

"It's a great reason," Booth insisted. "If a school can't make a good flyer, what makes you think they can teach a kid anything? Suck flyer equals suck school. Next." She shook her head and sighed, but accepted his judgment and moved on.

Booth picked up one of the last brochures, glancing at the lettering across the top and nodding.

"This is a good school," he said, handing it to Brennan. "Rebecca and I looked at this school for Parker. Small classes, all new computers and books, great sports program."

"I thought you liked Parker's public school?" Brennan asked.

"We do. The thing was last year when she was moving in with Captain Fantastic, it meant moving Parker to a new school zone. She wasn't sure if she liked the public schools there, but we talked with the principal at Parker's old school and they agreed to make a zoning exemption for him so he could stay. Now she just drives him there in the morning. But when we were looking at private schools, this was the one."

"It's expensive," Brennan noted, looking at the tuition rates.

"That's how it went from being the one to not-the-one," Booth grumbled. "Even between Rebecca and I, and Brent offered to help, we decided we just couldn't swing it. Besides, Parker likes his school, so it's no big deal."

"Hmmm," Brennan said, peering down at the pile of maybes and then back to the brochure in her hands. "Well, that settles it then."

"What, that's it?" he asked. "We've still got like, five flyers in the maybe pile." Brennan shrugged.

"Well, if you looked around and you thought this school was good enough for Parker… that's good enough for me," she said. "I trust your judgment." Booth gave her a peculiar look for a moment, then smiled and shook his head.

"You argue with me about how to sort out flyers, but you up and decide my judgment is good on something important just like that," he said, sounding baffled. "You really make me wonder sometimes." Brennan opened her mouth, undoubtedly to argue or say something witty, but before she could speak Booth's phone rang. He picked it up off the table and looked apt to throw it across the room after he read the caller ID.

"Shit," he said as he flipped it open. "Hello?" Brennan watched his scowl deepen as whoever was on the other line talked. After a brief exchange he hung up, and set the phone down with far more force than was necessary.

"Shit," he repeated.

"What?" she asked.

"I forgot," he said, standing up and shoving his chair under the table as if it had done him some personal misdeed.

"Forgot?" she asked.

"My appointment with Sweets," he growled. "I forgot I had one today. Damn it. Look, can you watch Parker for me while I'm gone? It'll only be an hour…" His anger dissipated slightly as he saw the look of dawning horror grow on Brennan's face. Alone in Booth's house with two young boys—it had to be the stuff of her nightmares.

"Booth, I…"

"You'll be fine," he said, grabbing his keys off the ring on the wall. "You know Parker's easy, they'll probably just watch TV the whole time. You can do it." He gave her a bracing hug around the shoulders as he lead her into the living room, keys jangling in his opposite hand.

"Hey Park, I have to go for a little bit, so Dr. Brennan is gonna watch you while I'm out. You guys have fun and _behave_," he said, stressing the last word, as parents are wont to do. Neither child seemed to register his words as he rushed out the door, not bothering to lock it behind him. Suddenly Brennan felt very alone, watching the boys watch TV and waiting for the moment when they would realize that they outnumbered her.

oOoOoOoOo

"You know, this was really a bad time for me," Booth said irritably as he took a seat in Sweets's office. "I have my son all weekend."

"Who's with him now?" Sweets asked mildly, seeming to know the answer before he asked.

"Bones," Booth replied. "She came over with Jamal, we were looking through some flyers."

"Flyers?" he asked. Booth nodded, still visibly grouchy.

"Yeah, for schools," he said. "She doesn't like that public school."

"I see," Sweets said, in that horrifically irritating way mental health professionals tended to. Or maybe it was just Sweets—Booth didn't have much prior experience with counselors, so he had little to compare the experience to.

"Yeah," Booth said uncomfortably, not liking at all the way Sweets was smiling at him. "What?"

"So have you and Dr. Brennan been spending a lot of time together since she brought Jamal to live with her?" Sweets asked. Booth shrugged.

"We spend a lot of time together anyway," he said. "Same as before I guess."

"Mhmm," Sweets said, exchanging the irritating I-see for more neutral paralanguage. "Do you feel that some of the responsibility of parenting Jamal falls on you, now that Dr. Brennan is his foster mother?"

"Kind of," Booth responded. "I guess just because I'm around him a lot, I kind of, I dunno, do the dad thing."

"Do you feel guilty about what happened to his father?" Sweets asked. Booth jumped to the defensive.

"No!" he nearly shouted. "No, I don't. Not after the way he treated him."

"But your father treated you the same way," Sweets pointed out. "And you loved him very much."

"I still love him," Booth said. "Not past tense; I still love my father."

"Right," Sweets said. "The point is, no matter how badly your father abused you, you never stopped loving him. The same must be true of Jamal. It wouldn't be abnormal for you to feel guilty about removing his father from his life, given your relationship with your father. You understand his predicament."

"His dad and my dad are not the same," Booth said. "His dad was running a meth lab out of their house, he put that kid in immediate danger. God knows what he saw going on in that house. My dad was just doing his job."

"Agent Booth," Sweets said patiently, almost sadly. "As long as you keep accepting the blame for your father's abusive actions, we aren't going to get anywhere in our sessions. You have to understand that you didn't earn your abuse—you didn't bring this on yourself. You didn't deserve what happened to you."

oOoOoOoOo

The summer sun beat down on the back of Seeley's neck as he pushed the lawn mower across the yard, slowly burning the skin. He could feel it fry—it already felt hot to touch, before long it would turn bright pink the way his dad's neck did when he mowed the grass. Today his dad wasn't mowing the lawn, though—he was. Now that he was twelve years old, he was tall enough and strong enough to use the gas-powered mower all by himself, without anyone having to watch over his shoulder.

He stood proud in the dew that morning before his father left for work, listening to the finer points of grass cutting—use the hand cutter by your mother's begonias, mow right along the edge of the curb and the privacy fence, but not too close to the chain link fence on the other side. He soaked up the advice with rapt attention, as if he were learning skills for battle against some enemy's powerful army, not an over-zealous patch of Kentucky bluegrass.

His father patted him on the back as he left, reminding him of the most important rule of all: keep the mower away from the Caddy. Over the past three years a lot of things had changed—like the yard, which had gone from a tiny patch of rye outside of the old place to a vast, flat stretch of greenery in front of their new cinder-block house—but nothing had changed about his father's obsession with that old car. Seeley nodded his grave understanding, and with that his father was off, leaving his trust in his son.

Seeley carefully started the mower, which sputtered and coughed a few times before it finally roared to life. For an hour he pushed the heavy piece of machinery back and forth across the yard, making sure the grass was neither too long nor too short. His father said to shoot for one and three-eighths of an inch, which meant nothing to Seeley until his dad compared it to the length of a house key. Now Seeley stood on the edge of the curb, bent over and holding the house key from under the mat up against the cut grass. Nearly perfect.

"Hey Seel," Jared's voice called out as he rolled his bike up into the driveway. While Seeley had spent all morning and most of the early afternoon meticulously cutting the grass, Jared had run off with his friends shortly after breakfast.

"Hey, where you been?" Seeley asked over the roar of the mower.

"Out at the empty lot," Jared answered.

"You know dad said to stay out of there," Seeley said warningly. "That's where they caught those guys selling drugs, remember?" Jared shrugged.

"So? What he doesn't know won't hurt him," he responded. "Besides, there's nothing bad about it in the daytime. We even made a ramp out of some old plywood and stuff, for the bikes. You should go down and check it out, it's really cool." Seeley entertained the notion for a minute—he hadn't been on his old mountain bike in almost a week, and the prospect of taking it over a jump did sound, as Jared had put it, 'really cool'. But his dad said no, and when he said something, he meant it.

"Nah," he finally said. "I got work to do. You know, work?" Jared shrugged.

"Scaredy cat," Jared taunted, glint in his eye.

"Am not," Seeley defended, continuing to push the mower. Jared stood by his bike in the garage entrance, one hand on his hip.

"Yes you are," he heckled. "You're just a big ol' baby."

"Shut up," Seeley threatened, stopping the mower again and turning to face his brother, who held his hands up in mock fear.

"Ooh, look at me, I'm Seeley and I'm scared to go down to the big bad empty lot 'cause daddy might get me," Jared mocked. Seeley had heard enough—he turned the mower off and approached his brother in quick, angry strides. Jared stood his ground, but stumbled back when Seeley got too close. Before Seeley had even touched him, Jared fell backwards into his bike, and the both of them fell backwards onto the Caddy.

Seeley watched in absolute horror as the bike's axel scraped along the side of the car door, taking a layer of paint with it. It made the sick crunching scrape of metal-on-metal, one that seemed to echo throughout the garage, down the street, through the trees, out into the world. The whole world probably heard Jared's bike scratch the Caddy—the police were probably radioing about it right now. What they aught to be doing, Seeley thought vaguely, was calling in the would-be murder of two young boys.

"Oh shit," Seeley said, in that way that held even more gravity when you were twelve and words like _shit _were banned from your vocabulary. Jared quickly jumped up and stepped back, standing by his brother and surveying the damage.

They had scratched the Caddy. The Caddy. The one thing in the entire garage, in the entire world, that they were forbidden to so much as breathe on by their father and the law and probably God himself. Seeley was surprised they didn't get struck down by lightning right on the spot, right where they stood. Maybe, if they were lucky, they would be—their dad would come home and instead of them, he would find just two big black scorch marks on the driveway. Two lucky little scorch marks.

But he wouldn't be so lucky. Luck never worked for Seeley like that.

"Oh man," Jared said, his voice high and squeaky with panic. "Oh man… oh man Seeley what are we gonna do?" His words were fast and jumbled, and Seeley had to take a few deep breaths to calm himself before he said anything at all.

"I…" Seeley started, but before he could really say anything they heard the sound of wheels turning into their driveway. They both spun around like cats caught in the cube steak, and saw their second-worst fear—their mother. She wouldn't make them pay, but she'd sure make them honest.

"Oh no," was all she said when she saw what her boys had been staring frightfully at. She put her hand on Seeley's shoulder, shaking her head.

"It was a accident," Seeley said, not knowing what else to say. It was the truth—it was an accident. Nobody in their right mind or even an insane mind would dare hurt the Caddy intentionally.

"I know," she said, bending over to take a closer look at the damage. "You'll just have to tell your father that when he gets home." It was as if she had just given them both the death sentence—three hours to live.

They spent three hours in the front yard, awaiting their execution. Jared sat on the curb pretending not to cry, while Seeley took the hand clippers and obsessively chopped at the grassy border around his mother's garden, meticulously snipping the blades one by one until they were perfectly level. It was all he could do to hold his hand steady as four o'clock came and passed, afternoon shadows beginning to stretch across the yard. It wouldn't be long now.

It wasn't. After he finished he took a seat next to Jared and picked at the bits of gravel in the road, and before ten minutes had passed they saw their father's familiar truck rolling lazily down the street. His arm hung out the window and from a distance they could see him singing good-naturedly along with the radio. He had no idea.

Briefly, Seeley felt the urge to take off. To run down the road, around the corner, down to the vacant lot. To squeeze between the boards of the rotten wood fence along the back of the lot, and hide himself deep in the woods. If his father was as drunk as he usually was when he sang along with the radio, he would run out of steam long before he could find him. Then he would just fall over on the ground and take a nap, and Seeley could flag down a car or a bus or a passing spaceship; anything that would take him far, far away.

He had this thought too late, though, as his father suddenly came upon the house. He trundled the old Chevy into the empty space in the garage next to the Caddy, his scratchy, carefree voice audible after he cut off the engine.

"_She tied you to a kitchen chair,_" he sang happily as he opened the door carefully, sure to give the Caddy clearance. "_She broke your throne and she cut your hair, and from your lips she drew…_" His song suddenly stopped, Seeley could hear it, and he knew his father had seen the scratch. It was as if the whole world stopped with him.

He let out a long, loud string of curses, and the hair stood up on the back of Seeley's neck.

"Jared!" he finally yelled, able to make a sensible word. They had left the bike propped up on its stand next to the car, hoping their father would make the connection and get done yelling faster. Jared stood from the curb and Seeley quickly followed him, both standing before their father shame-facedly.

"Jared, what the hell happened?" he asked loudly. His brother opened his mouth to answer, but before Seeley really knew what he was saying, he had intervened.

"It's my fault, dad," he said quickly. "I pushed him, I didn't mean to, he fell and the bike just… he just fell on it and…" He couldn't finish the sentence, couldn't put the terrible deed to words, but they all knew. He watched his father's face redden, saw his less-than-sober hand tremble, and he felt himself tremble a little too.

"Jared, go inside," his father finally said. Jared didn't ask questions, but high-tailed it into the house. Seeley looked not up at his father, nor at the bike or the Caddy or the big ugly scratch. He couldn't look at any of them, so he looked down at the ground instead.

There weren't really any words after that. His father said something, but he punctuated the sentence with a hard punch. Seeley had been expecting a slap, and was caught off-guard by the punch. It knocked him to the ground, and as he fell he was afraid he might take the bike with him and break something else. His head smacked against the back of the pavement and he saw a dozen small lights pop in front of his eyes. He blinked them away, just in time to narrowly avoid a kick in his direction.

"… fucking can't do anything I ask, I tell you a million fucking times, don't touch the goddamn car…" Seeley became aware that his father was now stringing together coherent sentences, which meant he was mentally clearer and had better aim.

"Dad, I'm sorry," Seeley pleaded, finding his feet and backing away slowly. It was like with bears—if you tried to run, it just triggered the prey drive. If you backed off slowly, maybe they'd just let you go in peace. Maybe you'd survive.

"Sorry? Sorry? Sorry doesn't fix the fucking scratch up the side of my fucking car, you little shit," his father shouted. "Sorry doesn't do shit for me. Maybe if your dumb ass had been a little more fucking _sorry_ before, we wouldn't be here, huh? Maybe if you'd'a mowed the fucking lawn like I asked you…"

"I did!" Seeley insisted. "I did, look dad, the grass is all cut, see?" He gestured out towards the lawn, hoping that by distracting his father with an accomplishment, the punishment would be less severe.

"You didn't do shit to that lawn," his dad yelled, stomping out onto the grass and pointing down at it like Seeley couldn't see something very blatant. "Lookit this shit, this grass ain't cut, it's all over the fuckin' place! You lazy little fuck, you just ride your bike all around like it's fucking Christmas every day and don't do a damn thing around here. Fuckin' disgust me."

"But dad…" Seeley started, but his father swung around with an open backhand. He missed, narrowly, and Seeley took another large step back. He always misestimated his father's arm span—he was like a gorilla, with long, thick arms and heavy knuckles. When he swung those hands around, they were like weights.

"Don't fucking _but_ me, Seeley, you… just go," he said, his anger seeming to fall out of the air half-way through his sentence, replaced by a long-suffering disgust.

"Wh… what?" Seeley asked, taken aback by the abrupt shift in gears.

"I said go!" he father bellowed, pointing down the street. "Get out, get out of my fuckin' yard, my fuckin' house. This ain't your goddamn house, get the fuck out!" Not knowing what to do, Seeley took a few paces backwards, catching himself as he nearly tripped over the curb. His father crossed the yard and let himself through the door, slamming it hard enough to rattle the windowpanes. Like a twister brought on by a hot summer storm, he came and went unpredictably.

Not knowing if he would come back out to continue his tirade, Seeley stood in the street in front of his house, his thumbs shoved into his belt loops. When he heard his father from within the house—obviously at a very high volume if he could be heard through the cinder-block construction—Seeley decided to take his instruction to heart. He started walking down the otherwise empty street, kicking small rocks and bits of gravel as he went.

The sun dipped behind him, turning the late July sky a bright orange and allowing a gentle wind through. Seeley felt it blow against his burnt neck, and shivered.

* * *

_Maybe there's a God above  
But all I've ever learned from love  
Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you  
And it's not a cry that you hear at night,  
It's not somebody who's seen the light,  
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah..._

_- Hallelujah, Jeff Buckley cover_

* * *

**A/N:** I don't usually put more lyrics in at the end of the chapter, but these are really important and I think if you look at all three "parts" of this chapter as an integrated whole, you'll understand why I did. If you've never heard the song "Hallelujah" by Jeff Buckley, you're really missing out and I highly suggest you go listen to it. (Don't I say that a lot? But I really mean it this time.) If you do know the song, I think it adds more to the way you read/interpret this chapter, and maybe this fanfic as a whole. The theme of the song and the theme of the fic really go hand-in-hand with one another, at least for me they do. Maybe it won't make as much sense until the entire thing is done, I don't know.

Anyway, there's not much more to say about that. What are your thoughts? Love it, hate it, wish I would disambiguify something for you? Leave a review and let me know! :)


	8. Don't Open Til the Morning Light

**A/N:** I promised I'd keep updating on this story even after I started my new one, and I'm keeping good on my word this time. :) If you don't know what I'm talking about, you should check out my new chaptered fic, _The Family in The Tree_. It's going to be a lot of fun. Alright, now that I'm done shamelessly plugging my other story, here's some more of this one. Enjoy!

* * *

_Maybe God can be on both sides  
Of the gun, never understood why  
Some of us never get it so good, so good  
Some of this was here before us  
All of this will go after us  
It never stops until we give in,  
Give in, say when..._

_- Say When, The Fray_

* * *

That was the summer she left him. Seeley woke up early that morning, less than a month after he turned twelve, and something was off. The house felt quiet and uneasy, as if a scale had been suddenly tipped overnight. Even the birds held their breath outside, quietly gazing into the window like little winged spectators.

It was then he noticed the open suitcase on his bedroom floor, half-filled with his own clothes. His door was open, and there was a shuffling in the room down the hall, like someone quickly trying to organize a stack of papers before they were due. He sat up in his bed and waited, and soon his mother came back into his bedroom, a stack of envelopes in her hands. She jumped when she saw him sitting up, staring at her.

"Goodness," was all she said, staring at him from across the room, tightly grasping the envelopes. She looked harried, and to Seeley suddenly much older than she was. She stuffed the envelopes into the bottom of his suitcase in an almost matter-of-fact way, as if they had always been there and she was simply putting them back where they belonged.

"I didn't mean to wake you," she finally said, smoothing the front of her wrinkled blouse. Her clothes looked like she had slept, or maybe had been up all night, in them. "You can be such a heavy sleeper, like a rock really. I suppose I was being loud. I'm sorry."

"Mom, what's going on?" he asked, rising from his bed and walking over to the open bag. Pants, shirts, underwear. She had folded them shoddily, much unlike her usually Spartan creases. Everything about it screamed.

"Well anyway, now that you're up," she said briskly, avoiding his question. "Finish packing this, as full as you can. Then you can help Jared with his. I have a few things I have to do before…"

"Mom," Seeley said forcefully, and her head snapped towards him, like she was suddenly seeing him for the first time. "What's going on? Why are we packing?"

"Pittsburgh," she said cheerily, but her eyes held a sort of repressed anxiety. "We're going to Pittsburgh… to see your grandfather." She smiled through tightly drawn lips, and Seeley raised his brows and sort-of smiled in response. He believed her, but at the same time he felt a missing truth.

"Why didn't you say so?" he asked, slowly opening one of his drawers and pulling out a handful of shirts.

"It's a surprise," she said, her voice cracking over 'surprise'. "I wanted… we wanted to surprise you kids. It's been so long since you've seen your grandfather."

"Where's dad?" Seeley asked, and he saw his mother pale visibly.

"Work," she responded, after a too-long pause. "He's just… he's working right now. But he'll meet us there."

"He's not coming with us?" Seeley asked.

"He'll meet us there," she repeated, staring not at Seeley but the window beyond him. "Now, finish packing up, and hurry."

"What's the rush?"

"You should be ready before lunch."

oOoOoOoOo

Booth paused before he put his key in the lock, resting his forehead against the front door and listening for sounds within the apartment. He couldn't hear anything through the door—no TV, no music, no loud voices, no alarms. He wondered if they were in the apartment at all, it was so silent; he had seen her car out front, but there was a park close by, and there was always the possibility they had walked there. It was where he usually took Parker on the afternoons he had him.

He turned the key and pressed the door open, letting himself in. He had opened his mouth and was about to call out loudly, but as soon as his eyes fell on the living room couch his lips spread in an awed smile instead.

Sitting in the middle of the couch, with her head leaned back on the back cushion, Brennan was sound asleep. The boys were curled up on either side of her, their heads in her lap. She had one hand resting on Jamal's shoulder, the fingers of her other hand in Parker's curly hair. On the coffee table in front of them was a children's dinosaur book, with pictures and captions, laid open to a page about velociraptors. On the opposite end of the table, several more books were stacked. Booth tip-toed over to the table, sifting through them one by one—more dinosaurs, machines, planets, and a book that from the cover appeared to be mostly about snot.

Brennan stirred, seemingly woken by his presence. She spooked slightly, but relaxed when she saw it was Booth standing on the opposite side of the table. She looked down and seemed surprised to realize there were two small people sleeping on her. Booth picked them up one at a time, moving them each to opposite ends of the couch and resting their heads on the armrests. He helped Brennan to her feet and she stretched her back, raising her arms above her head and letting out an almost feline sound. Booth jerked his head in the direction of his room, and they wandered in, shutting the door behind them.

"Did you have a nice nap?" he asked. She smiled, taking a seat at the foot of his bed and nodding.

"We went to the library."

"I noticed. What's with the snot book?"

"Your son picked that one out," she said, grinning. "He thought it was hysterical, had to have it." Booth puffed out his chest and smiled.

"That's my boy," he said, and she laughed, making an effort to keep her voice down so as not to disturb the children in the opposite room.

"I guess I just got tired once we sat down and started reading," she said, rubbing her eyes in an attempt to force them open.

"Looks like you weren't the only one," Booth said, looking at his closed bedroom door. "When I got home and didn't hear anything, I half expected them to have you hog-tied with a sock in your mouth or something."

"I was afraid of that too when you first left me with them," Brennan admitted.

"But they were alright?" Booth asked, mostly concerned about Parker's behavior. While he was generally well behaved with sitters, sometimes when he was with other kids his age they became the gasoline to his fire, setting him off. Brennan nodded.

"They were fine," she said. "They watched a little more TV, then asked if I would take them somewhere. That's how we got to the library."

"They picked the library?" he asked. She smiled.

"I said they were good, Booth, not angelic," she said. "They wanted to go to Aladdin's Castle, but I wasn't entirely comfortable with the idea of taking them to an arcade on my own. I said we could go to the library, and if they behaved, perhaps you and I would take them to the arcade tomorrow. I hope that's alright." She looked up and saw that Booth was giving her a particular look, his arms crossed over his chest. He broke into a smile and bounced lightly on the end of the bed next to her, leaning over and nudging her with his shoulder.

"Lookit you, Bones," he said proudly. "Cutting deals in exchange for good behavior, just like a real mom. You're really getting good at this." She smiled and looked down at her lap, shrugging. He pulled her chin in his direction with his finger, his eyes betraying his sincerity. "I really mean it," he said. "You're good at this."

"Thanks, Booth," she said, trying to control her smile as it widened. "I really want to be. I want to be a… a good foster parent to him."

"You're better than a good foster parent," Booth insisted, his hand still resting on the underside of her chin. "You're a good mom."

oOoOoOoOo

Seeley felt the car shift into park, and slowly opened his eyes. He didn't know how long he had been asleep, curled up across the backseat of his mother's car with his pillow and blanket like a make-shift bed—all he knew was that it was dark when they stopped at that last gas station, and it was still dark. They had left the house late, later than his mother had wanted—he saw her jangle the keys anxiously in her hand as they shoved the last of the bags into the trunk, pealing out of the neighborhood just before five. The way she drove across town frightened Seeley, though he wouldn't say so; her urgency, her flightiness, the way she obsessively shifted the rear-view mirror. She did not calm down until they were well on the highway.

Now he could see the shadows beneath her eyes in the glow of the streetlights, the soft lines around her eyes and mouth, the heaviness that had settled on her. Jared was curled up in the front passenger's seat, arms wrapped around his raggedy stuffed dog even though he was ten and really too old for a stupid toy like that. In comparison he looked so young, so small, so light. He was like a baby bird, and in this light she just looked old and tired.

He lifted his head up and peered out the window, and realized where they were. He saw his grandfather's old brick house sitting on the corner of the street, porch light attracting moths, curtains pulled back. He was waiting for them, and it made Seeley smile sleepily as he lay his head back down on the pillow. Just a few more minutes of rest, was all he wanted. Just a few more.

"We're here," his mother said softly when she looked back and saw Seeley with his eyes open.

"Where's dad?" Seeley asked tiredly. She didn't answer, but instead got out of the car and met her own father halfway across the yard. Seeley dozed for a few minutes while his mother and grandfather talked outside in the nighttime chill, then jerked awake when the car door opened next to his head.

"Boy, you're jumpy," his grandfather said, almost in a sad way. Even though Seeley was twelve, his grandfather still bent down and kissed his cheek, mussing his hair like he did when he was five. "Come on, let's get you boys into bed." Seeley carried his pillow and blanket under his arm and dragged his feet walking into the old house. His mother brought one of her bags, but left the rest in the trunk 'til morning. Seeley's grandfather carried Jared in from the car, even though he was ten, because he was just a baby bird, with a stupid stuffed dog.

The couch was pulled out and made up with sheets, and Seeley collapsed on one side, not bothering with the blankets. His grandfather set Jared on the other side, pulling the covers up over both of them and turning the lamp out. Seeley was vaguely aware of his mother and grandfather talking quietly in the kitchen, and then he was asleep again.

oOoOoOoOo

"You've done really well, Talia," Mr. Peters said warmly, his fingers steepled in front of him on the desk. "Really well."

"Thank ya, sir," Talia Williams replied, wringing her hands anxiously under the desk where he could not see them. He nodded, looking out the window briefly before returning his gaze back to her.

"You must be excited," he said. "Today being your last day in the program." She nodded, showing her two gold-capped teeth and the one missing entirely. "What are you going to do once you're out?"

"My cousin got me a job," she answered. "She a cleanin' lady, she got me a job cleanin' at a apartment complex."

"That's a good job," Mr. Peters commented. The smile never once left his face; it was plastered on, permanently. "Do you have somewhere to live yet?"

"With my cousin," she said. "She gon' lemme stay 'til I find somewheres else. She got it together good."

"You're getting it together too, Talia," Mr. Peters said. He looked down at the sheet of notes in front of him. "And what about your nephew? Your brother's son?"

"Uh huh," she said. "Once I get to workin' steady, I'm'a try to get 'im back home with me, now that I'm clean. He need to be with his family, that's where he belong."

"That is certainly important," Mr. Peters said vaguely. "Family, that is. Very important."

* * *

**A/N:** Come on, you know I can only go _so_ long without throwing in at least an inkling of BB-ness. :) Expect more at some point. By some point I think I mean the next chapter, though one can never be sure. So what did you think? Review and let me know!


	9. I Never Know if to Laugh or to Scream

**A/N:** You know, it feels like a lot longer than a week since the last time I updated this fic. I guess because I'm working on my other chaptered fic (and feeling guilty about not updating _Hands in the Snow_) and doing assorted one-shots here and there, it just feels like I'm writing a lot without making much headway on any one piece in particular. Did that make sense? I'm kind of doped up on allergy meds right now so I have to re-read everything two or three times to make sure it's... comprehensible.

Anyway, enough of that. I've been waiting for the right time to write this chapter, and I think this is it. Plus nine is one of my favorite numbers (the other is 24) so this seems like an appropriate place for this chapter. :) I know that didn't make sense, it's okay, don't feel like you have to understand what I'm saying. I'm just babbling. And now I'm done.

Oh, and as a warning, this chapter contains the use of racial slurs (well, one of them twice). I'm not going to censor myself so I'm just making you aware of their presence, in case that kind of thing offends you. But this entire topic, the abuse of children, is kind of an offensive topic by nature. So I guess if you're easily offended, you probably wouldn't be reading this to begin with, huh? (Didn't I say I was done babbling?)

That's all for now. Enjoy!

* * *

_Same old song, just a drop of water in an endless sea  
All we do crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see  
Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind..._

_- Dust in the Wind, Daughter Darling_

* * *

Time, unlike space, has the incredible ability to pass by you in flashes—pieces of a day or a moment—that are at once fluid and disconnected. You feel them fall from beneath you like the tide pulling sand out from under your feet; if you stand still long enough, the endless pull will take it, and take you too. You cannot snatch them from the air, but watch the wind carry them past you while you are, for a brief moment, a part of them. The moment when you see yourself in the pieces.

You will never remember every moment, every second, but only those flashes—those fragments in which you saw yourself, the ones you touched as they flew by, that grazed you gently and left their mark. In this way, time is a fluid, endless succession of bursts of light, of bright hot moments strung together, of dusty fingerprints. Our memory of time is not a movie, an endless reel of film, but a box of photographs—pieces of time we hold, touch, trace with our fingertips. We have only this. This is all we were, all we are. This is it.

oOoOoOoOo

"Jamal, how much farther?" Brennan asked, several weeks later, holding one arm up to shield her face against the scratchy underbrush as they trekked through the wooded lot behind her apartment building. The afternoon was hot and even under the shade of the trees, she was working up a sweat. Unaffected, the little boy ahead of her continued to blaze the trail.

"Almost there," he said, completely unfazed by the limbs and bushes scratching at his bare arms and shins. Finally they broke clear of the wooded lot, and found themselves on the far edge of a long-ignored city park. The grass was patchy and choked with weeds, and the playground equipment was visibly rusty even from a distance. Jamal took off at a sprint towards a lonely basketball court, which had one tall hoop and no net. In the middle of the court sat an old, faded basketball. Brennan followed the boy at a leisurely pace, and he had already picked up the ball and begun shooting baskets by the time she caught up with him.

"This is the park you've been walking to?" Brennan asked, slightly dismayed. "I thought you meant the one down the street."

"I don't like that one," Jamal said, sticking his lower lip out as the basketball sailed through the air, rolled along the rim, and fell out. He ran to collect it and try again. "All the rich kids is there."

"They've got much better equipment," Brennan pointed out, using the inside of her t-shirt to wipe the sweat that was collecting on her sternum. "And it's safer." It had taken Jamal nearly two weeks of persistent badgering before she finally broke down and let him walk down to the park on his own for half-hour intervals. He disliked having her sit on the bench and read while he shot baskets, and to be honest she relished the alone time she got while he was out. It didn't stop her from worrying about him, but at least she could worry in peace and quiet.

"They talk ugly to me," Jamal finally said, snatching the ball out of the air and holding it under his arm. He stared at Brennan from several feet away, and she crossed her arms.

"They 'talk ugly' to you?" she asked. He nodded. "What does that mean?"

"It mean, I dunno, they talk ugly," he said, giving the ball a hard bounce and watching it sail straight up into the air, catching it in his arms. "You know, be mean to me. Call me names, won't let me play on teams or nothin'."

"Why do they do that?" Brennan asked, not understanding the intricacies of children's social behaviors but wanting very much to. Jamal shrugged, taking another shot at the basket and making this one. With his back to her, he sighed.

"Because," he articulated carefully, "I'm a foster kid." Brennan felt something inside of her deflate; she knew she couldn't protect him from the stigma that came with being a foster kid, no matter how much she wanted to. Private school, new clothes, tutors, none of it made a difference—he was still a foster kid, and it was all over him.

"They think I'm dirty or somethin'," he continued, dribbling the ball and lining up for another shot, still facing away from Brennan. "Like, when I wanna play on teams, they say I can't, that if I touch the ball they're gonna get somethin' from me, like diseases or somethin', I dunno. And I'm black."

"Are you the only African American at the park?" Brennan asked, clinging to the aspect of the conversation that wasn't related to his foster child status. He shook his head.

"No," he said, bouncing the ball up into the air again and moving to catch it. "But the other black kids act different—they don't talk like me, they talk white. They said…" He trailed off, not finishing his sentence. Brennan didn't want to ask, didn't want to know what the kids said. Everything else was bad enough; she didn't want to know the rest. She asked anyway.

"What did they say?" There was a long pause, and finally, out of anger or frustration or injustice, Jamal took the ball in one hand and pelted it at the ground, causing it to ricochet at an angle off of the court, across the grass, and towards the swings.

"They said they was black and I was a nigger!" he finally shouted, storming off of the court and towards the swings. He sat down on one of them, facing away from Brennan, and hung his head. She looked up to the sky and blinked hard, taking a deep breath and searching for some reservoir of inner strength. When she felt like she might have found it, or something close, she began walking in Jamal's direction, thumbs looped into her jeans pockets.

She took a seat in the swing next to his, looking down at the grass beneath her feet and gripping the chains tightly with her fingers. Next to her, she heard the boy sniff loudly, drilling the toe of his shoe into the ground. They were quiet for a minute, Brennan trying to find the right words to say.

"I know how you feel," she finally said, breaking the tense silence between them. Jamal scoffed loudly.

"Bet," he said bitterly, wiping his nose on the back of his hand.

"I do," she said. "I don't mean that I understand how it feels to be subject to racial prejudice… to have people not like me because of the color of my skin," she said, trying to translate into words comprehensible to a ten year old. "But to have people treat me badly because of something I couldn't help, that wasn't true." Jamal didn't say anything, but by the way he had stopped twisting the chains of his swing and was sitting quietly, she could tell he was listening.

"When I was fifteen, my parents left me and my brother on our own," she explained. "Then my brother left, and it was just me. I was scared, so I called the police. When they found out my parents had left, and that I didn't have any other family, they put me into foster care." She saw Jamal look up at her out of the corner of her eye, but she didn't return his gaze—instead she stared out at the stretch of green in front of them, that eventually ended at a chain link fence before it turned into road, and beyond that, more apartment buildings.

"When you're a foster kid, all the other kids know. You show up at school in the middle of the year, and all your clothes smell like trash bags. You can't go to people's houses without their parents getting a background check first, you can't go on field trips at school. You get free lunch at the cafeteria, and everyone knows why.

"They call you names, like Trashcan or Orphan Annie. They think you're on drugs or that you're mentally challenged, that you're defective and your parents didn't want you anymore. They think you were thrown away, and that's why you're in the system. They act like there's something wrong with you—like if they touch you or stand too close, it will rub off on them, so they stay away. They never let you sit with them at lunch. They never ask you to be on their team. They don't want you to be friends with them… nobody wants to be friends with a foster kid. I know, Jamal. I know."

"It's not fair," Jamal said, and now he was really crying. He wiped the tears off of his face with his palms, shaking his head. "I ain't do nothin' to them, why they gotta be like that? Huh? Why?" Brennan pressed her thumb and index finger into the corners of her eyes, wishing more than anything that she had an answer.

"I don't know," she finally said, knowing she would never have a sufficient reason. Nothing would ever be sufficient to make up for their abuses. "But they're wrong. You're not a nigger, Jamal, and you're not trash. You weren't thrown away, because there is nothing wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with you."

Jamal rose from the swing, and threw himself at Brennan, wrapping his arms around her neck and burying his face into her shoulder. She inhaled sharply, taken aback by his action. Slowly she patted his back with one hand, then allowed herself to gently wrap her arms around the little boy, hugging him back.

"It's… it's okay," she said, partially to him and partially to herself. "It's okay."

oOoOoOoOo

Two weeks later, Brennan was busy stacking plates, forks, and cups on a picnic table at the 'rich kids park' while Jamal, Parker, Emma, Hayley, Hodgins, and Sweets played basketball on the nearby court. Booth wrestled a heavily iced sheet cake out of its box, and her father amused himself with a torch lighter, adjusting the level of butane and watching the flame go from a small flicker to a robust burst of light. Russ and Amy sat on side by side swings, watching the kids play and chatting amongst themselves, and Angela sat at the top of the slide and surveyed the picturesque scene from a distance, occasionally letting out a burst of laughter to let everyone know she hadn't sprouted fairy wings and flown away.

"This is really nice, Bones," Booth said to Brennan as she stuck candles into the cake, which said _Happy 11__th__ Birthday Jamal!_ in bright block letters. Balloons were weighed down to the four corners of the table, and a modest stack of presents sat on one of the benches. She shrugged.

"He deserves it," she said, looking out at the game that was progressing on the court. It appeared to be a team of Jamal, Hayley, and Sweets versus Parker, Emma, and Hodgins. Hodgins was, despite his height, a deceptively good basketball player. Well, against a group of children and Sweets, anyway.

"Sorry!" Cam said, approaching the table with a five-gallon bucket of Neapolitan ice cream. "I got caught in traffic on the way over, you know how that can be…"

"It's fine, thanks for stopping for me," Brennan said, taking the ice cream and settling it next to the cake. "How much do I owe you?" Cam waved her off.

"Don't worry about it," she said. "I love birthday parties. I haven't been to one of these in years, probably."

"Me either," Brennan said, sounding frazzled. "I hope I got everything right."

"You did fine," Booth said, hugging her good-naturedly around the shoulder. "Cake, presents, entertainment—" He gestured to the basketball court, where Jamal was dribbling circles around a very uncoordinated Sweets while the others laughed. "Everything you need for a great party. Why don't you go relax, talk to your brother or something? Everything's done here." She looked hesitantly at the full table, and then, deciding Booth was right, wandered off to where Russ and Amy sat.

"Is there a bathroom here?" Amy asked Brennan as she approached. Brennan motioned towards a small cinder-block structure at the far end of the park, with two openings marked on either side. "Great, thanks. I'll be back." Brennan took her seat on the swing as she left.

"Nice party," Russ said, smiling. "You did a good job."

"Thanks," she said, leaning against one of the chains and watching the kids play a new game, where they imitated each other's shots and spelled out barnyard animals. "You think he likes it?"

"Likes it? Look at him," Russ said, gesturing out. "He's having a great time, all of them are. Well, except the shrink. He kind of sucks at basketball." Brennan laughed as Sweets seemed to confirm Russ's statement, sending the ball flying well past the backboard, through the air, off towards the monkey bars.

"Air ball!" Hodgins yelled out. Sweets gave him a distasteful look before jogging off to retrieve the ball. Brennan smiled and shook her head.

"I'm glad you brought the girls," Brennan said. "Jamal hasn't made many friends at school, and he really seems to enjoy their company."

"The girls really like hanging out with him too," Russ said. "He's a great kid." They watched as Emma imitated Jamal's previous shot, nailing it with the precision of an L.A. Laker.

"I got you sucka!" she shouted, jumping up and down as Jamal groaned and ran off to get the ball. Russ snorted.

"And as an added perk," he said. "The girls have been learning all kinds of new vocab words." Brennan shook her head and smiled.

"He's been getting a lot better, but his word choice still leaves something to be desired," she admitted. Russ shrugged.

"All things considered, he's adjusted really well," he said. "Tempe, you've done a really good job. I know how it is to step in and try to parent a kid who's already nine or ten years old, it's hard as hell. And you're doing it alone. I'm really proud."

"I'm not really doing it alone," she said. "Booth has been there almost every day to help me with him. I don't know what I'd do without his help."

"Booth's a great guy," Russ said, giving his sister a peculiar smile. "He's really good for you." Before she could respond to his statement, she heard her father's voice.

"Are we gonna eat cake or what?" he asked. The kids dropped the ball and charged towards the picnic table, and soon everyone was converged around the birthday cake. Max lit the candles one by one, dramatically blowing the end of the lighter afterwards and tucking it into his back pocket. Jamal stood at the end of the table, his face reflecting the glow of the candles.

"I believe you're supposed to wish for something before you blow them out," Brennan suggested, to a chorus of suppressed snorts. She elbowed Booth, who stood next to her, in the ribs sharply.

"Yeah," he said, rubbing the sore spot with his hand. "Make a wish." Jamal chewed on his bottom lip for a moment, looking up into the sky and seeming to consider this wish deeply. Finally he took a deep breath and blew, snuffing out the candles flames in waves. Little tendrils of smoke unfurled, rising up into the sky and slowly dissipating into nothing at all.

oOoOoOoOo

"Well, that's it," the social worker from Children and Family Services said, smiling as he made a final check on the long list before him. He stood with Talia in the living room of the small apartment, light filtering into the dusty room through a white bed sheet hung over the window.

"That's it?" Talia asked, smiling hesitantly.

"Yep," he said. "Your landlord said you're good on your rent, everything in the house is up to snuff, and the paperwork came into my office yesterday from Family Drug Court confirming that you completed the mandatory counseling sessions. Do you remember when your meeting with the judge is?"

"Monday," Talia said, wringing her hands anxiously.

"That's right," he said. "Well, I'm signing off on this—" he said, punctuating the statement with his loopy signature at the bottom of the page, "—and if I'm right, which I think I am, you'll be getting your kids back on Monday morning." Talia beamed, touching her cheek with one hand and shaking her head.

"Eight months," she said quietly. "Eight months ago my kids got took from me an' they sent me to rehab. Now I'm finally getting' 'em back. I can't believe it."

"I'm really proud of you, Talia," the social worker said, patting her on the arm. "You've really cleaned yourself up."

"For my babies," she said, gesturing to a framed picture on the coffee table, which showed two young girls with wide smiles. "I just want my babies back. And my nephew."

"Your nephew?" the social worker asked. She nodded vigorously.

"Uh huh," she said. "My brother got took to jail, it's his boy. Poor baby been in some foster home fo' more'n two months now. Soon's I get my girls back, I'm'a try'n get him too."

"Well, I hope you do," the social worker said. "Foster care is no place for a child to grow up when he has family who can take care of him."

"Amen," Talia said emphatically. "Amen to that."

* * *

**A/N:** Yes, you were right, Talia is Jamal's aunt. Are there storm clouds rumbling in the distance? Absolutely. How will things end up? Well, that's for me to know and you to find out. :) Review and let me know what you think!


	10. I Want a Mom That Will Last Forever

**A/N:** I'M AN AUNT!!! My SIL had her baby yesterday afternoon and now I'm an aunt to a beautiful, amazing, gorgeous, absolutely perfect little prince. :) The very second I saw him I fell in love, and when he looked up at my eyes... oh God, he just stole my heart. I wanted to share that with everyone because I am SO thrilled, I have been waiting for this forever and now that he is here, I couldn't possibly be more in love with him.

And now that I've shared that extremely exciting, uplifting, happy piece of life news with you, you can carry on and read this very morbid, depressing chapter. I wish I had a happier chapter to share the news on, but this little doom-cloud just happens to be next. Oh well, that's just how it works sometimes.

At any rate, enjoy, and please review and let me know what you think!

* * *

_She up and died and left you in a fall you can not forget  
You were too young, you said, "Not yet, not yet, not yet."  
That year the cherries choked from pretty pink to red to brown  
You looked around, but she was nowhere to be found_

_It's alright, this could be a rough night  
So hold tight, this is not a fair fight  
It's alright, this will be a rough night  
So hold tight, this is not a fair fight..._

_- Fair Fight, The Fray  
_

* * *

By the time the sun had dipped low enough to touch the western horizon, only Brennan, Booth, Jamal, and Parker remained at the park, cleaning up the remnants of the party. Well, to be precise, Brennan was cleaning up the remains of the party—Booth, Parker, and Jamal were engaged in a game of two-on-one basketball.

Brennan paused and watched as Booth lumbered across the court, the boys each hanging from one of his thick arms and screaming with laughter as he carried them through the air. She smiled, and briefly worried about him throwing his back out again, but her thoughts were interrupted by Booth's phone ringing on the cement picnic table. As she reached for the phone, Booth shook both of the boys off and ran the last few yards to the basket, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet and pitching the ball effortlessly into the net.

"You carried!" Jamal shouted.

"Yeah well you both get personal fouls and fouls for holding, so I get a free throw," Booth said. "In fact, I get like, ten free throws."

"Do not!" Parker yelled.

"Do so!" Booth retorted playfully. Brennan rolled her eyes as she picked up the phone.

"Booth's phone, Brennan speaking," she said.

"Tempe? It's Jared. Where's Seeley?"

"Playing basketball with the boys," she said. "How are you?"

"Can I talk to him?" Jared asked, ignoring her cordial question. He sounded edgy, and Brennan's brows wrinkled.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Just put Seel on the line, will ya?" Jared asked impatiently. "Please." She looked up to the court, where Booth was single-handedly wrestling both boys to the ground, growling like a dog.

"Booth," she called out, holding the phone up in the air.

"I'm a little busy here!" he yelled back, noogying each of the boys in turn. Brennan pursed her lips.

"It's Jared," she said. "It sounds important." Booth hesitated, then released the boys from their captivity and jogged over to where Brennan stood, taking the phone from her.

"What's up?" he asked. Brennan strained her ears to hear Jared's fuzzy voice from a distance, but she couldn't make out what he was saying. She could tell from Booth's empty expression, however, that it was not good. Booth nodded slowly, sighing and rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. By the time he hung up, he looked pale and uneasy, almost as if he were about to be sick.

"Are you okay?" Brennan asked, taking a slight step towards him. He didn't speak—didn't answer her question, didn't even seem to acknowledge her presence. Instead he collapsed onto the picnic bench, leaning over with his head between his knees and his hands over his face. Brennan didn't know whether or not to get him something to throw up in.

"What's wrong?" she tried again, thinking maybe he hadn't heard her the first time. She looked up at the boys—completely oblivious, they had turned back to their original one-on-one game, running back and forth across the court and shouting out at each other. She sat next to Booth on the bench, reaching out to touch his back but hesitating, as if afraid her touch might break him. He looked easily broken.

"It's my mom," he finally said.

"What happened?" Brennan asked gently. "Is she in the hospital?"

"She's dead."

oOoOoOoOo

A week prior, Booth had sat on the coarse, thin couch in Sweets's office, jiggling his leg anxiously. Sweets opened Booth's folder, which had grown exponentially in size over the past two months, and flipped to his most recent page of notes.

"So Agent Booth," Sweets asked. "Your mother left your father when you were twelve, is that right?" Booth nodded, hating the synoptic recap they went through at the beginning of every session. "And how long did you live with your grandfather for?"

"Three years," Booth said.

"And after three years, then what happened?" Sweets asked. "Did your mother return to your father?"

"She never went back to him," Booth said. Sweets raised his eyebrows.

"But you did?" he asked. Booth shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Did you begin living with your father again when you were fifteen, Agent Booth?"

"Yeah," Booth said tensely.

"And Jared too?"

"No Sweets, I thought I'd fly solo," Booth growled. "Yes, Jared too. We both moved back in with the old man that year."

"Why?" Sweets asked. "What happened to your mother?" At first Booth did not answer, but eyed Sweets with a seething, venomous glare that, if looks could kill, would have dropped the psychologist on the spot.

"She had some problems," he finally said. "Personal issues, stuff she had to deal with. She wasn't… she couldn't take care of us anymore. She just didn't have it in her."

oOoOoOoOo

"Seeley."

Her voice struggled down the narrow hall, barely making it into the boy's bedroom. He sat up in bed with his eyes still shut, rousing from sleep the way a newborn baby's mother does when she hears her child's cry in the middle of the night. He walked down the hall into the living room, where he found his mother curled in the fetal position on the pullout sofa bed, her blankets in a heap on the floor next to her. She shivered visibly, and her sunken eyes stared out at him like a frightened animal. Her sugar-white skin, thin and waxy, shone in the glow of the muted television.

"Hey," he said gently, picking up the blankets from the floor and spreading them over her, taking care to wrap the ends around her feet to keep them warm. "Did you get cold?" She didn't nod, but her eyes held his in the way that let him know she understood the question. He pulled the quilt up around her shoulders and tucked it around her frail body, making sure no nighttime chills could sneak in.

She smiled and shut her eyes, wrapping her fingers around the edge of the blanket and pulling it towards her. In these little moments when she smiled, when Seeley felt he had done something to give her some glimmer of happiness, he felt his heart swell. He brushed her short, thin curls with his fingers, then bent over and kissed her cheek before retreating back to his bedroom for the rest of the night, or at least until her blankets fell again. Jared wouldn't wake up—he never did. And after working a ten hour day, Grandpa was just too tired, just too exhausted. Seeley knew the feeling; the second he fell back into his bed, he slipped back into unconsciousness, and did not wake up again until his alarm sounded.

A little more than a year after they had moved in with his grandfather, she began having episodes. At first they were mild, hardly noteworthy—she would insist that she had left the iron on, or the stove, and drive thirty minutes across town back to the house to check on them. They would joke—Seeley, Jared, and Grandpa—about her housewife paranoia. They didn't know then; how could they?

As the months passed the episodes became more frequent, more persistent, and new 'quirks' added themselves to the list. Seeley would often stumble into the kitchen in the morning and find his mother counting eggs in the fridge, or even wake up in the middle of the night to find her in his bedroom, counting the buttons on all of his shirts to make sure none had fallen off. She would iron slacks three, four, five times in a row, insisting that they had to be smooth. 'You don't want wrinkled pants, do you?' had been her response to their inquiries about her behavior. Or missing buttons. Or an odd number of eggs in the refrigerator.

Stress, the psychiatrist said it was, once they had finally convinced her to go. Leaving an abusive relationship, taking care of two growing boys and a household. She was a very tense woman. He gave her a bottle of Valium pills and instructions to take one as needed for her "episodes", and to see him again if the dose was not strong enough. With some encouragement from her father, she began taking one a day as she felt the waves of obsessive panic grip her.

Once a day turned into twice a day, turned into three times, turned into Seeley waking up at four in the morning to his mother's panicked cries, shaking the empty pill bottle violently in search of just one last pill. They called the doctor—he upped the dose. Then he upped it again. Her nerves were so badly frayed, like the battered end of a nylon rope, that she began taking the Valium with a rum and coke just to hasten the effect.

That was almost two years ago. After her first psychotic break, the one that went undiagnosed as more than 'stress', she stopped volunteering at the library. Then she became mysteriously absent at her knitting club meetings, her needles and yarn balls lying dormant on the back porch table for months. Her ritual home-cooked dinners became less and less frequent—by the end of their second year with their grandfather, they were lucky to come home and find that any lights had been turned on, much less a meal prepared. Usually they found her sitting on the couch, curled up under a throw, watching television. Only she didn't really watch it—with so much sedative in her system watered down with so much rum, she didn't do much but stare. Stare and, occasionally, smile—though before long the smiles seemed more like involuntary facial twitches than actual reactions.

When Seeley was fourteen and graduated from the eighth grade, she spent the entire morning ironing her one blue dress for the occasion. After three hours she had burned four of her fingers and burst into tears twice. Still trying to get himself together for the momentous occasion, Seeley took his mother's shoulders and gently pulled her away from the ironing board.

"It's smooth, mom, look," he had told her, holding the dress up in the air to show her. "See? No wrinkles. It's perfect." After enough sedatives to down a horse, she found it within herself to agree, and put the dress on without a fuss. Her hair was still limp and she had not put any make-up on by the time they arrived at the school's auditorium, but she did smile when her son walked across the stage. She saw him; she knew him. That was her boy. That was her baby.

That was the last time she went out in public. Now in high school, Seeley arrived home late every afternoon after football practice, sweaty and worn out. He biked the entire way there and back, since he couldn't drive and nobody could pick him up. After chaining his bike to the fence outside of their house, he kicked off his cleats and tread lightly into the house. Even though it was only six in the evening, his mother was usually asleep on the living room sofa, and he did not want to wake her.

This night he padded past her stealthily into the kitchen, putting two pots of water on to boil. His grandfather wouldn't be home for at least another hour or two, and there was no telling when Jared, now thirteen, would be. He was supposed to be home by seven every night—by the time their grandfather was—but some nights he was out until eight, nine, ten. Seeley didn't blame him; if he didn't have to come home, he probably wouldn't either.

He snapped a large handful of spaghetti noodles in half so they would fit in the pot, and once the water reached a rolling boil, dropped them in. Seeley usually made dinner, reading easy-prep recipes off the inside of soup can labels and the backs of pasta boxes. Spaghetti, tuna casserole, grilled cheese sandwiches, and pancakes were the things he was really good at making. Sometimes he went out on a limb and tried something a little more difficult, usually after Sunday morning Mass when he had the afternoon to himself to do backed-up schoolwork and cook. Last weekend he made stellar stuffed ravioli and sauce that even his mother, in her state of stupor, complimented him on.

Getting her to eat was hard most nights, which was why Seeley set two pots to boil at a time—he would make spaghetti in one, and white rice in the other. If they couldn't get her to eat anything else, he could usually mash up white rice and chicken broth and get her to take a few bites. She had to eat something; he had to make sure she did.

Once the spaghetti was cooked and drained, the salad was tossed, and the table was set, Seeley walked down the hall into his bedroom and collapsed on the mattress. He tried to force his eyes open, but it wasn't working. The day had just been so long—actually, the entire week had seemed a constant cycle of assignments, chores, and midnight care-taking, without any reprieve. Maybe it had been that way all month, or all year; at that moment, it felt like a lifetime of exhaustion was pressing down on him, begging him for just ten minutes of silence.

What would a nap hurt? He looked up at the red digital numbers next to his bed; his grandfather would be home in less than half an hour, and Jared too probably. His mom was asleep in the living room, or just catatonic, but either way she wasn't going anywhere. The doors were locked, the stove was off, dinner was made; he really had nothing pressing to do for the next thirty minutes. He shut his eyes and succumbed to the lure of sleep, not even bothering to crawl under the blanket.

He woke with a jolt, like someone would if they had been suddenly struck or shocked in their sleep. Disoriented, he reached out and hit the snooze button on his alarm, only to realize it was not the alarm sounding. Slowly his mental confusion cleared, and he realized it was screaming that had shaken him from sleep. His hair stood on end when he recognized the screams—they were his mother's.

He charged into the living room, ready to kill his mother's attacker. When he got there, though, there was no attacker. There was only his mother in a heap on the floor, arms wrapped around her middle, red-faced and screaming as if she herself were on fire.

"Mom!" he yelled, grabbing her by the shoulders and trying to help her up. She wailed even louder, if possible, and jerked free from his gentle grip. Her face and hands twitched as she twisted and writhed on the floor, her shrill screams magnified by the echo in the room. There were no sentences, no words, nothing he could understand, only the sound of her vocal chords fraying. She began clawing at her arms, at her face, still screaming. He grabbed her hands and wrenched them behind her, just to stop her from hurting herself, and in lieu she began attempting to bang her head against the ground.

"Please, stop," he begged, not realizing he was crying too. She continued to shriek at the top of her lungs, the sound throbbing in Seeley's ears, tearing something deep inside of him that would never mend, though he did not know it then.

Terrified, he looked around the room for anything he could subdue her with. He held her with one arm as he reached out onto the couch, grabbing the blanket she had been wrapped in previously. He pressed her arms to her sides and wrapped her tightly in it, almost as if swaddling a very large baby, wrapping his arms around her and holding her tightly to his chest.

Crouched on the living room floor with his mother in his arms, he began to rock back and forth slowly, whispering calming words into her ear. He crooned and hummed, saying or singing anything he thought might settle her. After perhaps ten minutes of this her screaming slowly subsided into quiet whimpers, punctuated every once in a while with a sharp gasp of air and a startled yelp. Tears still ran copiously down both of their cheeks, but she had stopped screaming, and he felt that if he just kept holding onto her, maybe she would be okay. Maybe, one day, if he just kept holding onto her, she would be all right again. One day she would be mom again. He just had to keep holding on.

oOoOoOoOo

"That must have been traumatic for you, Agent Booth," Sweets croaked, unashamed of the redness that rimmed his own eyes. Booth pawed at his eyes roughly.

"I wasn't the one having a mental breakdown," he said quietly, not seeming to trust his voice beyond that.

"And after that, they took her?" Sweets asked. Booth nodded.

"My grandfather was afraid she would hurt herself," Booth said. "He was afraid she… he knew she needed help, more than we could help her. We couldn't help her anymore. We took her to the hospital and she stayed there for a long time."

"Did you ever visit her?"

"Once," Booth said. "Just after that happened. She was so drugged, she didn't know it was us."

"I take it your father never took you to see her?" Booth shook his head curtly.

"He didn't want to see her."

"Did you?" The question lingered in the air long after it was asked, like a current running between the two men. Booth's face hardened, all prior emotion wiped from his expression.

"What I wanted didn't matter anymore."


	11. Until You Give In or Say When

**A/N:** It's funny to me, how the chapters that are the most depressing are always the most highly reviewed. You're gluttons for angst, all of you! Anyway, I'm glad you felt the last chapter. I won't say "enjoyed" even though many of you said you did, because it's hard to really enjoy something like that. Relish, maybe, or appreciate, or 'feel' but not so much enjoy. It's hard to enjoy writing something like that, and I know it's hard to enjoy reading it. You can enjoy the way it's written, but the subject itself... it's hard to do.

But as much as you are gluttons for angst, I know what you are even more ravenous for... and you'll get at least a nibble of that in this chapter. Also, as many of you have probably noticed by now, I love repetition. Symbols, motifs, thematic concepts... it's something I really enjoy inserting into stories. There is a lot of that going on here, and if you are a careful reader you will find the "easter eggs" littered in this chapter, both from previous chapters of this story and from other Bones stories I've written. Enjoy, and let me know what you think! :)

* * *

_We're coming close and then even closer  
We bring it in but we get no further  
We're separate, two ghosts in one mirror, no nearer_

_Later on if it turns to chaos  
Hurricane coming all around us  
See the crack, pull it back from the window  
You stay low, say when_

_And my own two hands  
Will comfort you tonight, tonight  
Say when  
And my own two arms  
Will carry you tonight, tonight..._

_- Say When, The Fray_

* * *

Brennan knocked lightly on the apartment door, shifting the weight of the brown paper bag under one arm. It was a full minute before she heard anyone moving inside; she almost knocked again, thinking that perhaps she hadn't been heard the first time. When he did finally open the door, she thought to herself that he looked like hell, and decided against voicing that opinion. His face seemed to sag—in fact, his entire body did. His shoulders were slumped, and he just generally appeared as if he had been carrying a rather heavy weight around for a long, long time. Part of her wanted to drop the bag and hug him, but she decided against that too.

"I brought you dinner," she blurted after a moment of being stared at as if he could not remember who she was. As if she were a stranger at his door, intruding on a very personal life. She shifted the bag again, holding it underneath with one hand and gripping the top with the other. "Macaroni and cheese, I know you like that." Finally Booth seemed to register who she was, why she was there. He gave her a half-hearted smile, which appeared more like a grimace than anything, and stepped aside to let her in.

The suit he had worn the day previous to the spreading of his mother's ashes lay crumpled on the living room floor still, tie flung over the coffee table. There was a nest of blankets and pillows on the couch, and the TV was blaring. No other lights were on in the house, and since the sun was beginning to set it was growing rather dark. Brennan got the feeling she was stepping into a cave—even the temperature in the apartment seemed too cold, though Booth looked unfazed by it in his boxers and wife-beater.

"Sorry," he said, watching Brennan survey his living room.

"Don't apologize," she said, stepping over the pile of clothes and setting the bag on the dinette table. "I understand that the past few days have been difficult for you." She had been at the spreading of his mother's ashes, at a Maryland pier. Someone at the group home had spoken with his mother during one of her bouts of lucidity about her death arrangements, and a witness's signature at the bottom of the sheet corroborated her desires. In the event of a life-threatening illness or injury, the hospital would be under strict DNR orders—Do Not Resuscitate. The paramedics began CPR on the way to the hospital, but as soon as her records came forth, all hands were removed. She died in minutes.

Her second order was that she would be cremated, and her ashes spread at the pier her father used to take her fishing at. He had been there, and Jared, and Brennan—the four of them, that was it. Five if you counted the contents of the urn.

The day had been beautiful, as hot and sunny and blue as one could ask for a day on the water. They went at sunrise, before most of the families and lonely fishermen had shown up, for a little peace. Booth's grandfather prayed, and Brennan watched a group of pelicans soar overhead as the three men bowed their heads observantly. As unreligious as she was, she thought they might see a lot more of God from that perspective, than with their eyes shut and their heads down. You couldn't see much of anything that way, not really.

Then the three men each took a handful of the ashes and waited for a salty morning breeze to come. It came, and they released her, crying unabashedly as they watched her go. Brennan had begun to feel extremely uncomfortable standing in their midst, and wondered why Booth asked her to come at all until she felt his hand grab onto hers. Then she knew, and she quietly thanked what might have remained of Booth's mother for everything she did in Brennan's life, without even knowing or meaning to.

"Smells good," Booth said, snapping her back into the present. She nodded, taking a deep breath and letting it out. He rubbed his face with the heels of his hands, an action he had repeated over and over again in the days since his mother's passing. "I'm gonna put it in the fridge for now though, I'm not really hungry."

"You need to eat," Brennan insisted, gently putting her foot down. "You probably haven't eaten since yesterday." Booth refused to look at her directly, and she knew she was right. He sat down in his nest on the couch while she dug around for something a little more sophisticated than the stack of Dixie plates on the counter. When she realized nothing else was clean she settled for the paper plates, dishing out mac and cheese for the both of them and taking a seat beside him.

"Thanks," he said, and he sounded thankful. They ate slowly, basking in the glow of the Food Network and learning about how Twizzlers were made. She kept casting sidelong glances at him as they ate—his face glowed from the light of the television, but it was blank. He opened his mouth, he chewed, he swallowed. He might have been listening to the TV program, but odds were that he wasn't.

There were so many questions she burned to ask—every time she did, she shoveled more noodles into her mouth to prevent her tongue from slipping. When was the last time he saw her? Did he know she was in poor health? Why was she living in a group home? Why didn't his father come to the spreading of the ashes? There were so many things, she realized, that she simply did not know about her partner. She knew he had parents, that he was estranged from them and they had little or no contact, but she did not know why. She knew he grew up in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, but she didn't know what his childhood houses were like, or what he did for fun, or why they moved from one city to the other. She didn't know what had broken his relationship with his family, or why, at the spreading of the ashes, his grandfather kept apologizing. Over and over again—_I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry._ He sounded like the gulls crying out at passers-by once the sun rose.

Instead, Booth asked her a question.

"Where's Jamal?"

"Russ and Amy's," she said, caught in the mire of her own thoughts and taking a second to remember the answer. "I had Russ approved by the court to keep him when I couldn't, for whatever reason."

"That was a good idea," Booth said half-heartedly.

"He was happy about it," she said. "He likes it there. They have some game system the girls are always playing, like the Super Nintendo we had as kids but without wires. I forget what it's called… a Woo maybe?"

"Wii," Booth said, and he finally cracked a smile. "It's a Wii."

"Ah. Well, he really seems to enjoy that. I think I might buy him one if he keeps progressing in his tutoring sessions like he has been."

"He's been doing good, then?" Booth asked, grateful to talk about something completely unrelated to his mother's death, or life, or anything at all about it. Brennan nodded.

"Great, actually," she said, scraping the last of the cheese off of her plate and eyeballing Booth's half-eaten helping. He handed it to her, and she smiled gratefully. "His reading is on grade level now, and his math is improving exponentially."

"No pun intended."

"Oh, I didn't even notice," she said. "Anyway, yes, he has been doing well, I'm very impressed with his progress and his tutor's patience. They meet three times a week after school, and I know Jamal can be trying when he doesn't want to do something."

"You said it," Booth agreed. "That's good, though. That's good to hear. He seems like he's acting out a lot less too."

"He is," Brennan agreed. "I actually discussed it with Sweets, who told me that Jamal's feelings of failure and frustration were being channeled into aggression in his home life. Now that he doesn't feel like a failure, he doesn't feel the need to act aggressively."

"Sweets came up with all that?" Booth asked. "Now I'm the one who's impressed." Brennan laughed.

"He certainly earned his degree," she said. There was a brief lull in the conversation, during which Brennan polished off Booth's leftovers. Finally she decided to pose the question she had avoided asking for almost three months.

"So," she said carefully, leaning forward and setting both plates on the coffee table. "How have your appointments with Sweets been?" She saw Booth's jaw stiffen, and immediately regretted having asked. He must have seen it in her face, because his features softened.

"They're alright," he conceded. "Not great. We've talked about a lot of… gone over a lot of stuff."

"How much longer will you be in therapy for?" she asked, relieved that he had not been angered by her question.

"Not much longer," Booth said. "Last time we met he said, 'I think we're really close, Agent Booth'. You know, that way he does, like he's playing X-Box with his geek friends or something and they're about to win. He thinks it's a game or something."

"I don't know what an X-Box is," Brennan said. "But I don't think Dr. Sweets views your past as a game, as some kind of secret to unlock. He respects you, Booth. I think he could help you." She chose her words one by one, resting on _help you_ almost as if it were a question. Like maybe she could help too.

"I don't need help," Booth said roughly, taking a sudden mood swing and rising from the couch. _Shit_, she thought silently. That had been the wrong word after all. He took the plates into the small kitchen with him, stomping on the foot pedal of the trashcan and tossing them in. He took a cup from the draining rack and filled it with water, holding it to his lips briefly but not drinking from it. Then he dumped the water out, dropping the cup with a plastic-on-metal clang into the sink.

"He keeps saying that," Booth said, leaning on his hands against the edge of the counter with his back turned towards Brennan, who stepped hesitantly into the kitchen after him. "Saying he can _help_ me, he wants to _help_ me, I need _help_ before I can go back to work. Damn it, I don't need _help_; I got this far, what the hell do I need it for now?"

He wasn't quite yelling, but he was close, and Brennan felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand alert. He had never yelled at her before—he had certainly raised his voice at her during their many arguments, but never yelled. He didn't yell, not really. Now he was very close to yelling and she found that it scared her. She realized just how scary of a man Booth could probably be.

"I didn't mean…"

"You never say anything you don't mean," Booth said, turning to face her. He was closing the gap between them, and she felt the unusual urge to backpedal away from him. Usually she felt just the opposite. "You've never said anything to me you didn't honest to God believe, Temperance. Don't tell me you didn't mean something you said—if you said it, you meant it. Don't lie to me."

"I've never lied to you," she said, stung by his words. He sighed, turning his back on her again and leaning his weight against the counter. Thank God it was marble, or quartz, or some kind of solid stone—anything lesser might break beneath him.

"I know," he said. Now he was far from yelling, but his words still rung in her ears as if they were loud. "I'm sorry. I know." He suddenly pushed himself away from the counter and stormed into his bedroom, not bothering to close the door behind him. She heard the springs of his bed squeak under his weight, even from the other room. She took a deep, settling breath and made the decision to follow him—it wasn't a hard one, she just didn't know if it was the right one.

"Booth." She paused in the doorway, watching him in the dark. There were still no lights on, and she could just see his silhouette sitting on the edge of the bed, elbows resting on his knees, face in his hands.

She approached him slowly, one foot in front of the other, just like she had walked on the tightrope as he stood watching beneath her. Careful step after careful step, distributing the weight just right so she would not fall. This was not the time to fall. When she reached the foot of the bed she slipped her shoes off and crawled onto the mattress like a cat—left hand, right hand, knee, knee. She made her way to the far edge where he sat, and when she reached him, settled herself on her knees directly behind him. She held her hands hesitantly in the space over his back, feeling the heat roll off him. Swallowing, she touched her fingers to his broad shoulders, and felt them tense.

She recoiled slightly, then settled her hands on him, feeling where the thin fabric of his shirt ended and his bare skin began. In the dark she could hardly see him, even so close—all she had was the feeling of him under her fingers. She ran her hands along the length of his upper back, moving up to his neck and shoulders, then down to about where his ribcage ended. Up and down in slow, smooth strokes.

She saw Angela painting—the brush resting gently in her grasp, as if she wasn't even holding it, but it was holding onto her. They were holding onto each other. She dabbed it into a color, then touched it to another, mixing them until they had created something else entirely. Maybe purple, or green, or orange. It would be something very bright—with Angela, it always was. Vivid, bold, outstanding. But in her mind's eye the colors were dull and unsaturated, almost shades of gray rather than her best friend's typical palette. Angela dabbed them together, darkening the shade. Then, seemingly satisfied, she picked an arbitrary location on the broad, blank canvas before her and began.

Long strokes, back and forth. Smooth, gliding, seemingly without friction. Nothing in the world was without friction—only in deep space, in the absence of force, could an object truly experience friction-free movement. It could roam the universe indefinitely, and if it never came in contact with another object, it would. Frictionless, fluid, forever and ever. Millions of years could pass and it would never slow, never change course, never stop suddenly in its tracks. Nothing could stop it.

Impossible in our universe, but watching the slow strokes, back and forth, you wouldn't know it. You might think, for just one second, that you could defy the forces of physics. That you could defy friction, defy gravity, defy logic. That you could be fluid and unending, could continue seamlessly for eternity without stopping. That you could never stop.

When she felt him crack, she wrapped her arms around his middle, bridging the gap between their bodies and resting her cheek on his shoulder. She felt him rock, and she rocked with him.

Smooth strokes. Back and forth. Never stop.


	12. Wait for the Thunder and the Rain

**A/N:** So... I'm not even sure who was actually able to read the last chapter of this, since I posted it a few hours before the website died for like, 4 days. If you didn't get an alert or weren't able to read Chapter 11 because of the site fail, it's there. :) Then after you get caught up you can read this one, which near about broke my heart to write. You'll see why. And don't worry, I promise this fic will see happy days. Seriously, you have my word on it, it's not going to be this depressing and doomcloudy forever. But you know what they say... when it rains, it pours. Enjoy, and leave a review letting me know what you think.

By the way, the song you will encounter later is "Family Business" by Kanye West. Just an FYI.

* * *

_She says things are fallen into place  
Feels like they're fallen apart  
I painted this big ol' smile on my face  
To hide my broken heart  
If only she knew  
This is where I don't say  
What I want so bad to say  
This is where I want to,  
But I won't get in the way_...

_- Ready, Set, Don't Go, Billy Ray Cyrus  
_

* * *

Brennan woke with a start the next morning, eyes shooting awake as if someone had sounded a loud buzzer. The room was quiet, though, save for her breathing and his. Very quickly her brain assimilated the previous night's events—she came over, brought him dinner, he detonated, and they had somehow ended up here. She was relieved when she realized all of her clothes from the night before were still on, right down to the earrings tugging at her lobes.

She lay curled into his shape like two crescent moons, one of his arms draped around her, the other underneath the pillow they shared. It was a tight fit, and she could feel his slow, hot breaths blowing on the nape of her neck where his face was nuzzled into her hair. She couldn't help but love the way it felt, and she smiled. One of her hands was resting near her face, while the fingers of the other were entwined in his. Had they really slept that way all night?

She knew she needed to get up, to assess and possibly begin damage control. She knew she should but she didn't want to—she was perfectly fine next to him, feeling him rise and fall against her back, fitted into the spaces between his fingers. It must have been early in the morning; the room was filled with the hazy grey-blue of the early morning, making everything that much softer, that much more serene. With everything cast into cool tones the room seemed to glow with a soft stillness that didn't really exist. It couldn't really exist.

She sighed, and something about it must have screamed, "I'm awake!" to Booth's subconscious, because his breathing halted, then sped up. They were not the easy breaths of sleep any longer—they were calculated and counted, like she could feel the pulse of his mind racing with each one. She decided she would still pretend to be asleep, and let him react naturally. Then she would know.

He didn't seem to react at all, other than that he raised his head slightly, then settled it back down on the pillow directly behind hers, and resumed breathing on the back of her neck. She wondered how long they would both lay like that, each pretending they were still asleep just to feel the other. She thought she might be able to keep it up for the rest of the morning if given the opportunity, but opportunity was whisked out the door when the phone in her back pocket rang loudly. They both jumped, and the ruse was over. She slipped her hand between them to reach for the phone and felt it brush the length of his abdomen as she did. He suppressed a shudder, as did she.

"Brennan," she said quietly into the receiver, though not sure why—she knew he was awake, and he knew she knew.

"Dr. Brennan, hi there," a vaguely familiar voice chirped over the line. "This is Cindy, from social services. How are you?"

"I'm… fine," Brennan said after hesitating for a moment. Even though she had removed her hand to take the call, Booth's arm was still slung around her midsection, his fingers toying with the sheets in her hand's absence.

"Great," Cindy said quickly. "I actually have some news for you." Cindy did not elaborate, and there was a tense pause on the line.

"Yes?" Brennan said, waiting for her to continue.

"Jamal's aunt has filed for custody." Cindy expelled the sentence in a rush of breath, like she had been holding it just before. Brennan realized she was holding hers too.

"What?" she said, confused. Booth shifted slightly, presumably to better hear the other end of the line since his head was so close anyway. "I was told that Jamal's aunt was in a rehabilitation clinic for drug abuse."

"She was," Cindy said. "Three months ago when Jamal was first placed with you, she was still at the clinic in Arlington. A little over a month ago she was released from the program, and about a week ago she regained custody of her own two children."

"They let drug addicts have their children back?" Brennan asked, not knowing why she suddenly felt so hostile towards the social worker. Cindy seemed to sense her hostility, but reacted with, if possible, even greater sweetness and sincerity.

"She completed a six month program," Cindy explained. "Family Drug Court monitored her progress, and upon graduation from the program social services felt she earned back the right to her children. When a child can safely be reunited with their family, we always feel it is in the better interest of the child to do so."

"And now she wants custody of Jamal as well?" Brennan asked, feeling incredulous.

"Yes," Cindy said. "She is Jamal's next closest relation—well, his only relation actually, other than his father. She has shown an intense interest in taking custody of Jamal, and after reviewing her petition we believe she is both emotionally and financially stable."

"You're telling me," Brennan said, nostrils flaring, "that after being out of rehab for, what, a month? You think this woman is capable of raising children? You think a—a _crack head_ is financially stable?" She felt hot and overcome with a sudden rush of emotion, and she sat up in the bed, running her free hand through her hair and shaking her head angrily. Booth still leaned on his side, looking up at her with his brows tightly knit.

"Dr. Brennan," Cindy said patiently, "I understand that after several months of care, foster parents form a particular attachment to their foster children. You're extremely concerned for Jamal's well being, that's natural. I can assure you, we are just as concerned. We only want what's best for Jamal."

"Then you're not going to grant her petition for custody," Brennan said. There was a heavy pause on the other end of the line.

"We already have."

oOoOoOoOo

The following afternoon Brennan drove across town with Jamal sitting in the passenger's seat, several bags of his belongings riding in the back behind them. Jamal practically put off an electric current, sitting upright in his seat and watching everything around them with interest. Brennan had spent the entire morning faking smiles—when she woke him up that morning, over their last breakfast together, packing his things into the car. Her face felt as if it had been contorted, twisted into knots. She wanted to smile genuinely, to be happy for his happiness, but she couldn't.

"Man, I love this song," Jamal said, reaching for the volume and turning it up. He sang along with the lyrics, bobbing his head. "This is family business, and this is for the family that can't be with us…" Brennan liked this song too, but not today. Today she wanted to throw Kanye West out the window, watch it shatter in the road through the rear-view mirror.

Before the song even ended they were parked in front of the social services building, and Jamal nearly flew out of the car towards the entrance. Brennan took her time, eyes pausing on each car in the parking lot. Which one was hers? Was she here yet? Would his things fit?

She was there, waiting for him in Cindy's office. She was a solidly built black woman with dark, shining obsidian skin, much unlike Jamal's coffee-and-creamer tone. She still wore her maid's uniform from work, and Brennan had to wonder how a Merry Maid could possibly afford to take care of multiple children. She must have had some other form of income. Probably welfare. Brennan hated herself for thinking it but there were a lot of things she hated in that moment, herself the least of them.

"My baby!" she nearly wailed, opening her arms and allowing the boy to step hesitantly into her reach. She pulled him tight and planted a kiss on his cheek, her eyes spilling over with tears. "Oh child I am so happy to see you, look at you! You're so big now!" Jamal nodded, but he looked over his shoulder at Brennan hesitantly. She felt the barely controllable urge to snatch him by the arm and drag him back to her car, to speed as far across town as they could as fast as they could. She wanted to take him home.

"All of the paperwork is settled, so you two are free to go," Cindy said cheerily, hands clasped in front of her. "Jamal, are your things in Dr. Brennan's car?"

"Yeah," he said, nodding. "They in the car."

"Well let's get 'em and go, baby," the woman said. "Yo' cousins can't wait to see you again!" Jamal grinned and all three of them followed Brennan out to the parking lot. Jamal's aunt whistled when she saw Brennan's car.

"Oh Lord," she said, impressed.

"She all kinda rich," Jamal explained.

"She bought you all them clothes?" his aunt asked, eyeballing the multiple duffle bags as Jamal and Brennan unloaded them, carrying them several spaces down to Talia's weather beaten Oldsmobile.

"Yes ma'am," Jamal said, slipping back into familiarity with every word exchanged with his aunt.

"I sho' hope you thanked her," Talia said as they tossed the luggage into her expansive trunk. It barely shut, and when it did, the four of them—Talia, Jamal, Cindy, and Brennan—stood awkwardly around the vehicle, staring at each other.

"I guess we be goin' then," Talia said, unlocking the doors. "Jamal, say goodbye." Jamal, who had been so upbeat and energetic before, suddenly looked like he would be sick. He looked up at Brennan, instinctively sticking his worn jacket sleeve into his mouth and biting down on it. Brennan opened her mouth like she would say something to the boy, but nothing came out. They just stood and stared at one another for a minute, before Jamal stepped towards her and hugged her around the middle. She bent down and gave him a proper hug, and he felt so small in her arms.

"Bye, doc," he said quietly into her ear, using the nickname she had once found petulant and disrespectful and nearly melting her with it.

"Bye, Jamal," she said, standing upright and looking up slightly. Jamal swallowed hard, then let himself into his aunt's car. Cindy and Brennan stepped away and let the car back out, and Brennan saw Jamal's head just barely visible in the car window, waving at her. She lifted one hand and waved back, and kept waving until the car was gone and so was he.

She exchanged a few words with Cindy before she got into her own car, leaning back into the seat and breathing hard. She stuck the key in the ignition, and the music picked up from where it left off.

_They don't mean a thing__  
All, all, all the things__  
All these fancy things  
I tell you that  
(all the glitters is not gold)  
All my weight in gold  
Now all I know, I know  
All these things…_


	13. Downpour On My Soul

**A/N:** Yeah, you knew it was coming. That didn't make it any less depressing for me to write. :( I miss Jamal already. We'll just have to see what happens next... anyway, enjoy, and leave a review with your thoughts!

* * *

_When destiny calls you  
You must be strong  
I may not be with you  
But you've got to hold on..._

_- You'll Be In My Heart, Phil Collins_

* * *

Booth stared at Sweets sitting idly in the chair across from him, clicking his pen rhythmically and watching Booth with a look of concealed interest. He was trying to hide his smile, Booth could tell—it made him grind his teeth so loudly that he could not hear anything but the sound. His fingers itched to wrap themselves around something, preferably Sweets's throat, but he resigned himself to grasping the arm of the couch tightly with one hand and pumping the other into a fist.

"Agent Booth," Sweets finally said, clicking the pen once more and holding it to the surface of the yellow lined pad. "This is the third time you've tried to cancel an appointment with me in the past two weeks." He paused, waiting for Booth to jump to his own defense. When he did not, Sweets continued. "The more sessions you cancel and subsequently reschedule, the longer this entire process is going to take."

"I get that," Booth said, teeth still clenched tightly.

"What was your reason for wanting to cancel today's meeting?" Sweets asked, as if he didn't already know. Everyone knew. Brennan told Russ, who told Max, who threatened Cam that if she didn't give his daughter a week off she'd sorely regret it. Hodgins overheard the threat, and relayed the information to Angela, who left three messages on Brennan's answering machine before calling Sweets in near hysterics, demanding that he go talk to her friend since she wouldn't speak to Angela, or anyone else. He knew. He was just playing dumb, and that irritated Booth more than anything.

"Personal reasons," he replied vaguely. Sweets frowned.

"Agent Booth, nothing is too personal to discuss in therapy. That's the point of therapy, to discuss personal issues."

"Why don't you just mind your own damn business for once?" Booth blurted angrily. "You know, instead of asking stupid questions like you don't already know, instead of playing your stupid little mind games, why not just shut up and mind your own damn business?" Sweets bit his bottom lip, then scrawled a note or two before speaking.

"You're very angry right now, Agent Booth," he said delicately. "But you're not angry at me."

"Yes I am," he said adamantly.

"No you're not," Sweets insisted. "You're angry about the situation with Jamal, but not with—"

"Yes I am," Booth cut off, loudly enough to drown out whatever Sweets was trying to say. "I am mad at you, Sweets. Pissed, actually. And it's not because of Jamal and it's not because of her, it's because of you, okay? I'm pissed at _you_."

"Why is that?" Sweets asked, unaffected.

"Because you threatened to report me to the advisory board if I skipped another meeting," Booth nearly hollered. "That means I have to be here. Being here means I can't be there."

"There?" Sweets asked.

"With her," Booth said. "I can't be with her right now because I have to be with you, and she needs me a hell of a lot more than I need you. I should be there but I'm here and it's just… it's fucked up, is what it is. You're fucked up, Sweets."

"I see," Sweets said, taking more notes. If Booth's words had impacted him in any way whatsoever, it was well concealed. He had learned long ago not to let a patient's harsh words affect him. "Do you think that maybe you're projecting your anger over the uncontrollable situation with Jamal onto me, and that's why you find my compliance with the disciplinary terms of your leave, as you put it, 'fucked up'?"

"No," Booth said stubbornly.

"I think you are," Sweets said.

"I think you're a jackass," Booth replied.

"Agent Booth," Sweets said patiently. "Name calling isn't going to progress this session any faster, and it's not going to help us get to the root of the problem." Sweets watched Booth for a long moment; Booth stared unwaveringly at the microfiber pillow on the couch beside him.

"It's not right," Booth finally said. Sweets had to stop himself from releasing a sigh of relief.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Everything," Booth said. "This whole thing, with Jamal and his aunt taking custody. It's not right. Tem—Bones took better care of him than anyone in his life ever has. She gave him everything he needed, everything he wanted, and then they just yank him out and just…" Booth trailed off, breathing deeply and staring at the popcorn ceiling.

"Does it remind you of being placed into your father's custody when you were fifteen?" Sweets asked. Booth's jaw set even as he refused to look at Sweets. "Your grandfather cared for you and your brother in ways your father never had, but when your mother was institutionalized, your father was instantly granted custody. Do you feel like the same thing just happened to Jamal, the injustice of being taken from a good home and placed into a bad one?" There was a long, tense pause between them, and Booth let out a loaded sigh.

"It's just not right," Booth said. "Just because someone has a title—a father or an aunt or whatever—doesn't make them the better parent. It doesn't mean it's better for the kid. It doesn't mean anything."

oOoOoOoOo

Seeley stepped out of the locker room showers, wrapping a towel around his midsection. Football practice had never seemed longer in his entire memory—not only did they do stadiums until two of them vomited, but they also ran three miles and did lunges across the field twice. Conditioning, coach called it. Conditioning for a tour in the Middle East, maybe. Not for a Junior Varsity football team.

He pulled his clothes out of his locker and put them on slowly, feeling his muscles strain with every movement. He knew he wouldn't be able to walk come tomorrow; he could barely lift his feet now. The three-mile bike ride home would be his true test of endurance.

As Seeley was suffering just the thought of having to pedal his bike up and down the Philly slopes, his attention was brought to the present by a familiar voice heckling him from across the locker room.

"What's the matter Seel, conditioning too much for you? Maybe you should try something a little more your speed, like, I dunno, the powder puff team!" He knew without looking who it was: Mark Foster. His elementary wall-ball nemesis had grown significantly over the past six years, and was now neck-and-neck with Seeley for height, and wider in girth. They shared a quiet mutual distaste for one another on the field during practice, but in the locker room with no coach to regulate their actions, it was a different story.

"Why don't you stick it up your ass, Foster. You like that, don't you?" Seeley said coolly, sending a chorus of _Oooh_'s through the crowded room. Seeley smirked and Mark's features darkened, his chest puffing out.

"So does your mom," Mark uttered dangerously, and the room went completely silent.

It was no big secret what had happened to Seeley's mother—that they had moved to Pittsburgh three years ago, and Seeley and Jared returned without her. With two sons mysteriously motherless, people talked, and it wasn't long before someone had a friend whose cousin's sister's brother-in-law's aunt worked at a mental health facility in the Pittsburgh area and knew of a Booth woman having been admitted not long ago. Patient confidentiality was zilch, and both boys walked around their Philadelphia suburb with the shadow of an insane mother clinging to them like a scarlet letter.

Seeley jumped to his feet, fists balled up at his sides, face flushed.

"Don't talk about her," he hissed.

"Or what?" Mark taunted. "You gonna go crazy on me too?" In a flash Seeley, who was not as heavily built as a youth as in his adult years, was across the room and at Mark's throat, grasping it with both hands and slamming the boy repeatedly into the locker behind him. Mark threw wild punches at Seeley's face, and finally one of his fists made contact, sending him wheeling backwards. Taking advantage of his brief disorientation Mark jumped on Seeley, wrenching one arm behind his back and slamming his face into a locker door. Seeley nailed Mark in the gut with his free elbow, and when the boy was doubled over knocked him to the ground with a solid hook to his shoulder, throwing all of his weight and rage into it.

Everything went fuzzy, until Seeley realized that he was being forcibly restrained by his football coach, who was yelling something incomprehensible into his ear. He saw Mark Foster lying on the locker room floor, face bleeding, and saw a foot kicking him in the gut repeatedly. It took a few seconds for his brain to connect him to his own foot, and finally he realized what he was doing. He allowed the coach to pull him away, shoving him onto a bench and threatening him within an inch of his life to stay put.

The coach helped Mark to his feet and out of the locker room, the crowd of boys following him out the door. One boy strayed by the door, turning and giving Seeley a wary over-the-shoulder glance before shaking his head and leaving with the rest. Seeley was alone, with only the pounding of his heart and Mark's words to keep him company. _You gonna go crazy on me too?_ Seeley tasted blood on his lips, and brought his fingers up to his face; his nose was bleeding, probably from when it had been smashed up against the locker. He wondered how Mark looked.

Soon the coach returned, having deposited Mark and his friends elsewhere. He approached Seeley where he sat, as instructed, and took a seat on the bench across from his.

Coach Harper was everything one might expect a high school football coach to be—graying, sun-weathered, ruddy, and callous. He barked orders like a drill sergeant, occasionally ripping the baseball cap off of his fat head and throwing it into the grass, grinding it into the dirt with his heel when he was especially unhappy with his team's progress. At that moment he had the baseball cap but no grass to grind it into, but he looked livid enough to try. His jowls quivered as he narrowed his eyes at Seeley, as if trying to read something in his face.

"Coach, I'm so—"

"No you're not," Coach Harper said with a sharp shake of the head. "Sorry I stopped you 'fore you killed him, maybe, but you aren't sorry you did it." Seeley didn't argue, staring down at the floor underfoot. Blue, white, blue, white, patterned like a checkerboard up and down the length of the room. The blood from his nose made little splatter marks on the tile. "What the hell got into you, huh?"

"Nothing," Seeley said.

"Bullshit, nothing," Coach Harper spat. "You're a good kid, Seeley, but you looked ready to kick Mark Foster to death. That wasn't nothing—that was something." Seeley looked up at the coach and was surprised to see that, rather than looking angry, he looked genuinely concerned. Seeley muttered something incomprehensible, and Harper told him to speak up.

"My mom," Seeley finally said. "He was talking about her." Harper nodded in understanding; he knew the stories just as well as the kids did. He sighed in the way only aged men can, resting his hands on his knees.

"Look," he finally said, and Seeley did. "I don't know what happened to your ma, kid, but if it's what they say, I'm sorry. I really am. My mother was a saint, lost her four years ago, God rest her soul. It's damn honorable to fight for your ma's name, kid. Damn honorable. But what would she think if she saw you kickin' the shit out of some idiot in the locker room, huh? What would your poor motha think of her son then?" Seeley didn't say anything, but chewed the inside of his cheek, eyes reverted to the tile floor again.

"I get it," Seeley finally said, nodding his head.

"So do I," Coach Harper said. "Trust me kid, I do. I know your life ain't peaches and cream over there with your old man, but you gotta get it together. You can't haul off and slug whoever crosses you funny, that ain't how life works. Maybe that's how your old man does it—" Seeley looked up suddenly at the Coach's words, but now Harper was looking down the line of lockers, to the dented one where Seeley's face had met metal. "—but that's not how it's s'posed to be. You gotta keep yourself in check, kid. You gotta do better." Seeley swallowed hard, setting his jaw.

"Okay," he said. "I will."

"I got your word on that?" Harper asked, putting his hand out. Seeley shook it, nodding.

"Yeah," he said, boy and coach both rising to their feet. "Yeah, I promise. I'll do better." Coach Harper nodded, satisfied.

"Good. Now go clean yourself up, looks like Foster musta got in one good hit before he went down." Seeley touched his bleeding nose, flinching at the radiating pain it caused.

"How is he?" Seeley thought to ask. Coach Harper seemed to resist the urge to smile.

"Let's just say he won't be gettin' a girl anytime soon with a mug like that," Harper said. "I'll see you tomorrow at practice?"

"Yeah," Seeley said. "Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," Harper said, tipping the brim of his worn hat at Seeley and lumbering towards the door. As he pushed it open, he turned back towards Seeley, who was mopping his face with a wet paper towel.

"Hey," he called out. Seeley looked up.

"Yeah?" he asked. Harper paused, then smiled.

"Your ma would be real proud of you, kid. Real proud."


	14. She Wants to Go Home, But Nobody's Home

**A/N:** I'm so glad you enjoyed the last chapter... a lot of you have been voicing throughout the fic, "I wonder how Booth became the incredible guy he is, with such a horrible upbringing?" I have to think that it was people like Coach Harper and his grandfather who turned Booth down the right path in his life, since it was obviously not due to his father's influence.

It seems like everyone has had one of those in their life, whether it was a parent or other family member, or teacher or coach or whoever else... someone who showed you the right way when you were at a crossroads in life and helped shape the person you became. My mother and I have always had a very tense, often negative relationship with one another... I still love her no matter what, she's my mom, but at many points in my life she was not there for me. During those times I turned to my aunt, who everyone in the family refers to as my "other mother" because she had such a huge hand in raising me. I know if it wasn't for her I wouldn't have turned out half as good as I did... she gave me somewhere to stay when I couldn't handle being at home anymore, someone to vent my frustrations to, and mostly just someone I knew would love me no matter what I said or did. So this is my shout-out to her: I love you Aunt Nancy. :)

Now that I'm done with my boring life-lessons tangent of the day, here's the next chapter. Enjoy!

* * *

_Excuse me, too busy  
You're writing your tragedy  
These mishaps you bubble wrap  
When you've no idea what you're like_

_ So let go (let go)  
Jump in  
Oh well, whatcha waiting for?  
It's alright  
Cause there's beauty in the breakdown_

_So let go (yeah, let go)  
Just get in  
Oh, it's so amazing here  
It's alright  
Cause there's beauty in the breakdown..._

_- Let Go, Frou Frou  
_

* * *

Brennan roused from the couch at the sound of the whining kettle letting her know the water had reached a rolling boil. She removed the kettle from the burner, turning it off and filling a mug with water. She tore the packaging off a bag of chamomile tea and dunked it into the mug, feeling steam rise off of the surface of the water and condense on the underside of her hand.

Everything she did was slow and lethargic, as all her movements over the past three days had been. She had gotten quite a lot done, but all of it slowly. She had washed all of her dishes—even taking clean ones out of the cupboard and washing them again—making sure they were absolutely pristine. Her counters had been decluttered and scoured, and she had considered having the wood floors stripped and waxed before settling on an old-fashioned hand scrub instead. She vacuumed the couch cushions, hand-washed the drapes, turned her mattress, and organized six months' worth of mail. Her windows were so clean she feared a bird might fly directly into them, and she had so thoroughly disinfected her home that she felt more like she was in a hospital than an apartment building.

The only room she had not cleaned was his. She left it just as it was, closing the door when she returned home without him as if sealing off a funerary temple. She had no reason to go in there—no need to make the bed, to straighten the sham pillows, to pick dirty clothes up off the floor. There were no dirty clothes to pick up anymore.

She settled back on the couch with her tea, blowing on the surface as it steeped. The television on the wall across from her was off, but she stared at it as if it was on. She could see her own reflection in the black screen, dressed as if she had somewhere to go but refusing to leave the house. Compartmentalize and move on, she had told herself. Push it aside and go on with your life. Don't wallow.

She took a sip of the tea and it burned her, and as she pressed her tongue against her hard palate to stop the pain she heard a knock at her door. She didn't acknowledge the sound or its maker, but they would not be ignored. They continued to pound, and she continued to stare at herself in the television, wondering when her reflected self would get up and answer the door.

After a minute the pounding stopped, and just when she thought she was in the clear she heard a light clicking sound, and a jiggling of the door handle. Within a few seconds the door clicked and swung open, and she heard him enter the apartment.

"Honey, didn't you hear me knocking?" Max asked, entering the living room with a brown paper bag in hand. Brennan sighed.

"Did you pick the lock again?" she asked. Max shrugged.

"You haven't made me a key yet," he said. "Speaking of, when are you gonna get that done?"

"Dad, nobody has a key to my apartment," Brennan said. "Not you, not Russ, nobody."

"Does Booth?" Max asked, settling on the couch next to his daughter and sitting the bag on the coffee table in front of them.

"If I didn't make one for you, what makes you think I'd make one for Booth?" she asked. Max gave her a pointed look.

"Do you really want me to answer that?" he asked. She didn't say anything, taking another sip of tea instead. He watched her sadly for a minute, then picked up the bag and held it out to her.

"What's that?" she asked. He smiled.

"Snickerdoodles," he said. "I know how you like them and I thought you could use some cheering up. You haven't been answering my calls." She sighed, taking the bag and peering into it. She pinched the edge off of one of the cookies and nibbled on it—they were good, but she wasn't really hungry. She set the bag back on the table, along with her tea.

"I haven't really been in the mood to chat," she said.

"That's okay, honey," Max said. "You don't have to if you don't want."

"In fact, I'm really not in the mood for company either," she said suggestively. "I appreciate the cookies, but—"

"Oh no, you're not kicking me out," Max said in a warning tone. "You've been holed up in here all by yourself for days now, you need some company."

"I'm fine, dad," she insisted. "I'm just taking some time for myself, is all."

"You won't answer Angela's calls, that's not like you," Max said. She raised her eyebrows.

"She told you that?" she asked.

"Or Booth's," he added. This time her brows dove into a troubled furrow.

"Have you been talking to him?" she asked.

"No, but you should be," he said. "He's really worried about you, sweetheart. He just wants to know how you're doing."

"He shouldn't be," she said. "I'm fine."

"Honey," Max said patiently. "Please don't shut me out." She ignored his pleas, crossing her arms and leaning back into the couch, shutting her eyes. She squeezed them hard so that little white lights popped in front of the blackness. Stars. They were both quiet for a moment, and she felt Max settle back into the couch before he spoke again.

"I remember when you were a girl. Not a girl, a young woman really," Max reminisced. "You were probably twelve or thirteen, right during junior high. Every day you used to come home and sit on the couch with that same exact look on your face." Brennan didn't say anything, but was touched by the memory. She opened her eyes and looked over at him, and saw that he was staring at her. "You would sit back on the couch and shut your eyes and I would ask you, 'What's wrong?' You know what you always said?"

"I don't want to talk about it," Brennan answered. Max smiled sadly.

"That's right," he said. "You didn't want to talk about it. You've never been the kind to talk about things, and it's always ended up hurting you. You can't keep stuff inside you like that, Tempe, or it'll eat you from the inside out."

"You never let it go, either," Brennan said, remembering.

"That's right," Max said. "I sat down next to you and I poked at you for a while 'til you would finally come out with it. It was always something the other kids at school had done to you, or said to you. Bunch of piranhas."

"Teenagers can be exceptionally cruel to one another," Brennan agreed.

"They sure can," Max said. "But you never showed it, 'til you got home and sat down on the couch and it was like it all came falling down on you. But even then you wouldn't talk about it—even with the whole damn world falling down on you."

"Dad…"

"You know what else I remember?"

"What?" she asked, nearing the end of her rope with the entire conversation.

"The morning your mom and I left." Brennan's muscles tensed, and she narrowed her eyes slightly, scrutinizing the look of appeal on her father's face. She couldn't tell what direction he was taking this, and wasn't sure she really wanted to know.

"What about it?" she finally asked, curiosity having gotten the better of her. _Curiosity killed the cat_, her mother used to tell her and Russ when they would go poking their noses into things they shouldn't, whether it was something she was cooking or a mysterious package in the back of the car. _Satisfaction brought him back,_ she would reply cheekily.

"Everything," he said. "I tried but trust me, I can't forget it. I've spent almost twenty years trying to block that day out of my mind, but it's as clear now as it was then. I can see everything, minute by minute, and it still hurts."

"So do I," Brennan said very quietly, almost inaudibly.

"It hurt your mom even more, though," Max said.

"She made the decision to leave," Brennan pointed out.

"That's why it hurt so bad," he said. "The way she saw it, I got taken away from my children, but she did the taking. Didn't matter how many times I reminded her, _Honey, you did it to save their lives_. It didn't matter… she still hated herself for it."

"She told you that?" Brennan asked. Max pursed his lips.

"Nope," he said. "She didn't say anything about it. She never talked about that day, after that day. I brought it up, because I wanted to talk about it—I had to talk about it. I had to try to put words to the guilt and the heartbreak 'cause I felt like it was gonna tear me in half. But your mom? She didn't say anything. She couldn't. She would just sit for a long time, quiet, with that look on her face. With _that_ look on her face." Max pointed at Brennan, staring at her hard.

"She wanted to compartmentalize her feelings," Brennan said, understanding her mother's point of view. "She wanted to put them behind her and move on."

"Honey, you can't do that all the time," Max insisted. "Some things, yeah, it's better if you just try to forget about 'em and move on. But some things that happen are just too big—sometimes you can't just put it in a box and walk away from it. You have to deal with it… you have to square off with it, man to man, or you'll never get past it."

"Did she ever get past it?" Brennan asked hesitantly. She saw that her father's eyes were wet.

"No," he croaked. "She never did. Temperance, she died with it. She never got past it and it killed her a little more every day until the day she… sometimes I feel like it was mercy, you know? She hurt so much, she hated herself so much for it, couldn't let it go… at least after she died, she got peace. If nothing else, getting killed gave her some kind of peace she didn't have here." Max wiped away at his moist eyes and shook his head, chuckling softly.

"Look at me," he said. "Like a baby. Anyway, I'll leave you alone. I just… I just wanted you to know. It's too big, honey. This time, you can't go it alone." With that he leaned in and kissed her cheek, rising from the couch and heading towards the door.

"Dad?" she called over the back of the couch as he passed through the door. He looked back at her. "Thanks."

"I love you, honey," he said, smiling.

"I love you too," she replied. He shut the door behind him and the room was empty and quiet again. Brennan picked up her tea and pressed it to her lips, and found that it was cold. A reel spun through her head, projecting images she had not thought about in months as she got up to microwave the cold drink. Like on cue, there was a rap of knuckles on the door.

"Bones!" She heard his voice holler through the door. "I know you've been ignoring my phone calls. Look, if you don't open this door in sixty seconds, I'm kicking it in." She left the mug in the microwave, walking across the apartment and opening the door.

"You could just pick the lock," she muttered, letting him in.

"Any lock worth picking is—"

"—worth kicking," she finished for him. "Right. The door was open anyway, dad just left."

"Your dad came by?" he asked. She motioned towards the table where the bag of cookies sat.

"Help yourself," she said, retrieving her tea. She sat back down on the couch and he sat next to her, accepting her offer and inhaling one of the cinnamon-dusted treats. They sat quietly, him eating her cookies and her finishing off her tea, until all that was left was the sweet, faintly apple-y scent in the mug. They both stared into the black mirror of the television screen, looking each other only in their reflected faces. They finally faced each other, almost simultaneously.

"Bones, I—"

"I never got over it," she blurted, interrupting him before he could say anything meaningful.

"You… what?" he asked, caught off-guard and having no idea what she was referencing.

"When you died," she said. "Or, well, when the FBI feigned your death. I said your funeral was a waste of time, and that I had already gotten over it. But I didn't. I never got over it."

"I… I know, Bones," Booth said, still utterly confused as to what had brought on this revelation. "Why are you telling me this now?"

"You know?" she said, now confused herself. "How could you possibly know that—I didn't even know until ten minutes ago."

"You knew," Booth said. "You just didn't know that you knew."

"I knew what I knew," Brennan argued. "And I didn't know that I knew what I know now." Booth gave her the look he usually reserved for her long-winded anthropological rants, brows knitted together.

"I have no idea what you just said," he said slowly. "But I knew you weren't over me dying. You were just in denial about it."

"No," she insisted. "I had… or I thought I had. I went to work and I stopped thinking about it—"

"Not thinking about something isn't getting over it," Booth said. "That's just pretending it didn't ever happen to begin with. That isn't dealing with reality; it's denying it, which is what makes crazy people crazy. They make up their own little crazy world where real things don't happen." Brennan looked hurt by the comment, and Booth wasn't sure why, but he stopped talking. She chewed on the inside of her cheek, looking down at the table where her empty mug sat.

"I felt crazy," she finally said. "I've always thought myself to be an emotionally stable person, but I was beginning to believe that I was losing my mind after you died. Things I thought, things I felt… I knew objectively that I was experiencing post-traumatic stress but I thought I could move past it if I just threw myself into my work and stopped thinking about it. I tried, but the more I attempted to compartmentalize what had happened, the less in control I felt."

"I don't know what to say," Booth said when she had stopped talking. "I didn't know it had been that hard for you."

"I don't like to talk about my emotions."

"Trust me, I know."

"Well, I feel that emotional responses to social situations are purely subjective and severely biased, and don't serve any real purpose in the problem-solving process."

"Yeah but when bad things happen, it's not all cut and dry like that, like it is in the lab," Booth tried to explain. "You can't just look at it and say, 'This is what's wrong, this is how to make it better, let's do it.' You've got to let it out so you can move past it."

"Yes you can," Brennan insisted. "If you distance yourself enough from the situation, you can see it objectively."

"Sometimes it's impossible to get that much distance," Booth said. "When it's too close, it doesn't matter how far you _run_ from the situation, Temperance. It's still going to hurt, and you'll have to deal with that pain eventually."

"I didn't say to run from it," she said. "Only to assess the situation objectively."

"Come on, listen to yourself!" Booth said, throwing his hands up into the air. "Put distance between yourself and the situation? Observe it from so far away that it looks like it's happening to someone else, not you? You try to get so far away from what you feel that you don't feel it anymore, but that's not gonna help you. You can't get past something until you feel it, really _feel _it. You didn't have to really feel it when I died, because I came back before you did. When your parents disappeared, that feeling overwhelmed you so much that you put up walls that didn't come down for _fifteen years_, Temperance. Fifteen years of being locked up in your own head because you didn't want to _feel_ what had happened to you. Does that really sound rational to you?"

She didn't say anything in response, but stared at him with an indiscernible expression on her face. He couldn't tell if she was angry or upset or still analyzing his words. She swallowed, biting the tip of her tongue before allowing herself to speak.

"You're right," she said. That was all. Booth was mildly stunned—he had expected a rebuttal, a bashing of heads, an adamant refusal of science and logic to give up the good fight. Instead she had waved a white flag.

"I'm right?" he asked. She nodded.

"You're right," she repeated. "By analyzing my past responses to emotional trauma, you've made it painfully obvious that attempting to distance myself from my feelings has not been a very effective problem-solving strategy."

"That's… that's right," Booth said, still trying to accept his victory. "Bones, look, I know bad things have happened to you, and you've done the best you can to deal with them. But there are better ways to do it—ways that hurt you less." He took her hands in his to drive his point home, and she looked up at him, caught in his stare. He squeezed her fingers and felt her squeeze back.

"Has it worked for you?" she asked. "Facing your emotions head-on as opposed to ignoring them for the sake of objectivity. Has it worked?" Booth looked down at their hands, feeling hypocritical.

"You know," he said, trying to crack a smile as he spoke, "I'm not so great at talking either. Feeling, I'm good at, whether I like it or not. Talking, not so much. When you talk about the things that hurt, it makes them more real. It puts all that pain out in the open, raw, where everyone can see it. Sometimes you don't talk because you hurt so much already, you don't want it to hurt anymore."

"That's why you don't talk about your father," Brennan said, more as an observation than anything. He nodded.

"Yeah," he said. "That's why I don't talk about my dad. It still hurts. But when… but when I do, it helps, a little. You let a little bit of it go every time you talk about it, you know?" They were quiet, both staring down at each other's hands, thinking hard.

"Booth," Brennan said suddenly, forcing him to look up at her. He saw that her eyes were wet, and it took him by surprise. His instinct was to pull her in towards him, but he resisted the urge for the time being. "I want to… I want to talk about things. I want to let them go." He let go of her hands and she wrapped her arms around him, resting her cheek against his shoulder. He rubbed her back and felt not only her tears soaking into his shirt, but his own falling into her hair.

"You can do that," he barely said, swallowing hard and holding her as close as he could, wishing there was a way she could fall into him. If only she could fall somewhere deep inside of him, and he could keep her safe.

"It hurts so much," she cried.

"That's okay," he sniffed, losing his composure altogether. "It's supposed to."


	15. So Many Stories of Where I've Been

**A/N:** I've been a busy bee over the past few days with updates! It feels so good to get all this writing done... until this week I haven't had the time to just sit and write non-stop for hours the way I like to. Over the past few weeks the updates I have made I've written during broken up periods between other activities that took precedence. It feels great to just sit and write and look at the clock and realize that two or three hours have flown by without me even realizing it. :)

About this story in particular... boy has it gotten longer than I thought it would be. Originally I foresaw it being a 10-12 chapter project, much shorter than _The Foster Child in the Forensic Anthropologist_, but here we are on Chapter 15 and I've got at least 4 or 5 more before I see this thing being finished. I guess it's going to be just as long as _Foster Child_ after all! Judging by the awesome feedback y'all have been giving, though, I don't think you'll mind.

I thought there would be more to this chapter, but I ultimately decided to split it into two different chapters, since the parts had two distinct moods/themes and they work better separately than together. You'll see what I mean when you read the next chapter, I guess. Anyway, enough rambling... enjoy!

* * *

_And silently within  
With hands touching skin  
The shock breaks my disease  
And I can breathe_

_And all of your weight  
All you dream  
Falls on me,  
It falls on me  
And your beautiful sky  
The light you bring  
Falls on me  
It falls on me..._

_- Falls on Me, Fuel_

* * *

Brennan leaned back into Booth's chest, his arms wrapped around her upper body. She rested her head on his shoulder so that she could set his chin on top of it, fitting all of the pieces of the puzzle together perfectly. She couldn't remember in her life crying so profusely, for so long, with somebody else. There had been many moments alone, in her empty house or in the lab when she had lost her composure, but she had never had a meltdown of such magnitude in the presence of another person.

She sighed—she genuinely felt exhausted by the experience, as if the tears had taken all of her energy. Like all she could do was lay there and breathe with him. She was alright with that.

Eventually she regained enough energy to make words, sentences, thoughts. She began to talk, and so did he. They told their life stories in a way that was both intimate and peculiarly distant—as if they had not known each other for four years, as if the details that made them who they were had gone missing. She went on for a while, filling in the gaps—he knew much of her story, much more of hers than she knew of his anyway. At points he asked questions or made comments, but mostly he let her talk. The things that hurt her, that made her who she was—she wasn't afraid of him knowing anymore, of judging her by them as others had. This, she knew, was the safe zone. Not Sweets's office, not the diner, but wherever his arms were.

When she stopped, he started. She could both hear and feel him speak, his words rumbling from his chest beneath her like the humming engine of a car. He filled in his own gaps, much larger than hers had been—what she knew primarily was that his father had been a raging alcoholic, but what that had meant for Booth growing up was left mostly to the imagination. After a while he stopped and she was surprised to find that he was not out of tears, and neither was she. It was a peculiar response—he cried, she cried. She knew the anthropological basis for empathetic emotional responses, but the application of such responses was startling nonetheless. He held onto her like she was a stuffed dog, and she nestled into him like a baby bird seeking comfort in its nest.

He found that confiding in her was much different than confiding in Sweets. He felt, with Sweets staring at him from across the table, reducing his life to notes on a pad of paper, that he was being scrutinized, judged, that by judging the past Sweets was in fact judging him. He felt defensive, almost assaulted—like he had to fight back.

With her it was different. Throughout most of his recount she did not, in fact, even look in his direction. They both stared out the window on the opposite wall as they took turns talking and listening, saving one another from the excruciating spotlight of eye contact. Occasionally she turned her head and looked at him, or he to her, but it was short-lived and often during the gaps between the words. As if to make sure the other was still there.

With her he did not feel criticized or attacked, or the need to defend himself and his father. She did not judge, or wheedle, or push or insist or read between the lines. It was not, in fact, in her nature to read between lines at all, so he knew there was no danger of that. She would take what he said at face value, and understand that it was all he wanted from her. She would not dig at him for an underlying psychological significance to the words he chose or the faces he made. The visual aspect was moot—there was only the auditory, and tactile. She would hear him, and feel him, and that was all they needed. All they wanted.

They talked throughout the afternoon, watching the sun dip across the window and beyond the neighboring building, the sky darkening to black. They watched the streetlamps come on, the windows across the way darken with sleep. If they were hungry, or tired, or stiff, they didn't feel it. He felt her, and she felt him, and they felt themselves empty out onto the floor, and that was all that mattered anyway. They patched their lives together, story after story, until there was little left to tell. They pumped out every last drop until they ran the well dry. They were dry, and emptied, with nothing left but the breath between them.

"Booth?" she said after a significant moment of silence between them, where they had listened to their ebb and flow like a night tide. She still watched the dark window, and he looked down at the profile of her face, waiting for her to speak.

"When you had to move back to your father's house, after your mother…" she trailed off, wanting very badly to phrase it in a sensitive way but not sure how to.

"Was hospitalized," he offered for her.

"Yes," she said, relieved. "After that, why didn't your grandfather fight for custody of you and Jared? Why did he let you go back to that?" Booth sighed, and Brennan's own body rose and fell slightly with the action of his chest.

"To tell you the truth," Booth said, "I don't really know. I think he felt like when he lost mom, he lost us too. I think… I think he thought that after what we had to deal with, with mom getting sick, that we'd been worse off with him than with dad."

"But that's not true," Brennan said, turning her upper body so that she could better face him. "Your father abused you, physically and emotionally. How could be possibly believe you were better off in an abusive environment than with him?" Booth could see the absolute sincerity in her expression when she spoke, the true bewilderment in it.

"You heard him at the pier," Booth said, looking at the microfiber couch cushion so that he would not have to answer to her gaze. "_I'm sorry_, he kept saying it, over and over. He knows he let us down, and mom, too. He was supposed to protect us, all of us, and he couldn't. Every time I talk to him, on the phone or Thanksgiving or whatever, he says the same thing every time before I leave. _I'm sorry._"

"Do you forgive him?" Brennan asked.

"You forgave your father," Booth said. "He left you, but you forgave him. You just forgive the people you love, Temperance. Even when they hurt you."

"My father had to leave me," she argued. "Your grandfather didn't."

"But I think, in his mind, he thought he did," Booth said, trying both to explain it to her and to fully understand it himself. It was a question he had thought long and hard on over the years. "He thought he did, that we weren't his and he screwed up his one chance to help us, and mom, and after that… he loved us, the last thing he wanted was for us to get hurt. You know, even if I don't know anything else, I know that."

"What happened to you wasn't fair," Brennan said. Booth tightened his grip around her.

"What happened to _you_ wasn't fair," he said. She shook her head.

"No," she said. "It wasn't, but I got my family back. When do you get your family back, Booth? When do you get to mend your relationship with your father? Bad things might have happened to me, but in the end…"

"Your family got its happy ending," Booth finished. "Your dad was acquitted, your brother is out of jail, and you got closure on your mom's murder. You got your family back."

"Yes," Brennan said, almost sadly. "We got our happy ending. But when do you get yours?"

"Well," Booth said, biting on the inside of his cheek as he deliberated over his words for a moment before he spoke. "I don't speak to my father, my brother's an alcoholic, my mom's dead, and my grandfather feels so damn guilty we can hardly have a conversation. But on the other hand, I have Parker. He's smart, funny, he cares about other people… he's a great kid. The whole reason I get up in the morning, you know?" Brennan smiled as she watched Booth talk about his son, his face lighting up just at the thought of him.

"That's true," she said. "Parker's a great kid."

"Yeah," he said. "And, you know, I have you, too. Between you and Parker, that's all I need. I figure, if I've got just two people in the world that mean as much to me as you and him, I'm one hell of a lucky guy. That's a happy enough ending for me." Booth's eyes crinkled in the corners as he smiled, and Brennan found it infectious.

"You know," she said, looking down at their feet next to one another at the end of the couch, "I realized something, when the Gravedigger took you."

"What's that?" he asked. She paused for a moment before answering.

"I knew I cared about you," she said. "Deeply. You're my partner, but you… well, you're my best friend. I spend more time with you than anyone else, I share more with you than anyone, even Angela. I am closer to you than anyone else in my life."

"It took me getting kidnapped for you to realize that?"

"No, I just told you, I already knew that much," she said. "But when she took you, when I thought I might lose you…" She turned over so that she was lying on her stomach, using her forearms to prop herself up on his chest. "Booth, I—"

"I love you," he said suddenly, cutting her off.

"I was about to say that!" she said, sounding slightly scandalized. He smiled.

"I know," he said. "But I always pictured me saying it first."

"That's not fair," she laughed, shaking her head and unable to not smile.

"All's fair in love and war," Booth quoted, feeling _the L word_ glide effortlessly off his tongue as if he had been saying it for years. In his mind, he had been.

"I do," she said, staring him directly in the eye as if to emphasize a point. "I love you, Booth. I didn't think I did, but now I realize that I just didn't want to."

"You can't help loving someone, Bones," he said, his fingers laced over her back. "And besides, what's so bad about loving me?"

"Nothing's _bad_ about it, it would just be much more convenient to not love you."

"Why's that?" he asked.

"Because we work a high-risk job where our lives are constantly on the line, because the romantic and work spheres generally don't overlap well, because there are strict enforcements that prohibit workplace relationships in situations like ours…"

"You've thought an awful lot about this, huh?" Booth half asked, half teased.

"I like to thoroughly evaluate a potential situation before taking action, yes," she said. "What's wrong with that?"

"You think too much," Booth said. "Some things you can't over-think, you just have to jump in and see where they take you."

"Like what?" she asked.

"Like this." In one quick movement he leaned in and bridged the gap between their faces, kissing her. It only lasted for a moment before he pulled back, unsure of how she would take it. She looked surprised, then smiled and shook her head.

"Do you have to hop the gun on everything?" she asked.

"_Jump_ the gun," he corrected. "And yes, I like to go first."

"First is worst, second is best," Brennan teased, and Booth quirked his brows.

"Who taught you that?" he asked.

"Jamal," Brennan said, her eyes sad but her smile reminiscent. "How did it all go? First is worst, second is best…"

"Last is the one with the hairy chest," Booth finished. She gave him a funny look, and he laughed. "I have a seven year old, what do you expect?" They laughed together, and when it had subsided, she sighed contently and rested her head against his chest, wrapping her arms around him. Who knew this moment between them would come so effortlessly, so naturally? If it ever happened, she had expected something terribly awkward, or intense, or passionate. Never did she imagine they would transition so comfortably.

"He'll never forget you, you know," Booth said after a while.

"You think so?" she asked.

"Will you forget him?" he answered with a question, which usually irritated Brennan immensely but in this moment did not.

"No," she said quietly. "Never."

"There's your answer."


	16. All You Wish For and All You Need

**A/N:** I think we had a little misunderstanding... I didn't mean to scare you when I said the two parts were different in mood/theme! I think some of you took that as meaning that this next part would be totally depressing, judging by the reviews you left. That's definitely not what I meant, and you'll see that once you've read this chapter. :) By the way, I'm glad that you enjoyed the exchange of I-love-you's... I wasn't sure how it would be received, since it wasn't passionate and pulse-pounding and very _film noir_ the way a lot of fics are about it. This just felt natural to me, and I was happy that you seemed to agree.

Anyway, enjoy this next chapter (I enjoyed writing it), and let me know what you think!

* * *

_'Cause I'm hopeful, yes I am  
Hopeful for today  
Take this music and use it  
Let it take you away  
And be hopeful, hopeful  
And He'll make a way  
I know it ain't easy but  
That's okay, 'cause we hopeful..._

_- Hope, Twista f/ Faith Evans  
_

* * *

Life is rhythmic. Every aspect, from the rigidly scientific to the deeply spiritual, has a rhythm about it, a pattern—something one can settle into and feel, and move with. The sun rises, the sun sets; the tides ebb and flow; cells divide and multiply. Perennials burst forth from the hardened crust of winter and, as surely as a newborn child takes their first gasp of air, brightly-colored buds will protrude from their stems and open themselves to the world. We fall into these patterns that pass and overlap one another effortlessly, and it becomes our life. We fall into the rhythm of life, and it allows us the pleasure of hearing the tempo for what it is—music.

With as much difficulty as she had adjusted to life with Jamal, she adjusted to life without him. She fell out of her old patterns—making lunches, correcting school assignments, cleaning up after the perpetual hurricane that an eleven year old boy is wont to be—and into a new set. Or rather, it was her old set, before Jamal, which felt so foreign to her now as to be new.

She became responsible, once again, for only herself. When she woke in the morning, she made breakfast for one. When she was racing the clock on a murder case, often stuck in the lab for hours at a stretch, she did not worry about who would be able to pick him up from school. She worked late, well into the night and often early morning, simply because she could—there was no bedtime to enforce, no school to prepare for in the morning.

Her patterns were not entirely the same as before, though. Now that they had appraised their relationship and made necessary adjustments, she found herself occupying a new sphere—Booth's. It wasn't as if they weren't a constant presence in each other's lives before, but there was a palpable difference in their relationship and interactions. Their words were less guarded, their actions less reserved, and with everything out in the open there was no reason to read into anything the other said—the _what if's_ were gone. No longer did they agonize over the unasked questions: _What if she doesn't feel the same way? What if he's not interested? What if I'm misunderstanding him? What if she laughs in my face? What if? What if?_ The undercurrent of sexual tension fled their interactions, and was replaced by the rhythm of two people working in comfortable tandem with one another. They were now, more so than ever before, two halves working as a whole unit, in all aspects of their lives. Her clothes claimed a corner of his closet, and his bar soap was in her shower, because God forbid he smell like women's body wash. They were like little flags, laying claim to their territory—_This is mine._

oOoOoOoOo

"Remember, the reservations are at six," Booth reminded through the phone as Brennan pulled into the gas station, rolling her eyes.

"I know, Booth," she said, parking the car at an empty pump.

"It's four-thirty now," he said. "You're not even here yet, and you still have to get ready…"

"Booth, I am perfectly capable of keeping track of time!"

"I know," he said, groaning. "It's just, this is dinner with my boss's boss's boss, and they invited me, and I feel like I'm the sacrificial ram or something and if I screw something up they're gonna throw me in the fire. So I just don't want to be late, okay?"

"I understand," she said. "I'm just going to put gas in my car, then I'm going home. I'll be at your place by five-thirty."

"Five-twenty would be better."

"I'm hanging up now," she said.

"Yeah, I wouldn't want you to go all Zoolander on me," Booth said with a strained chuckle.

"I don't know what that means," she said. He sighed.

"Nevermind. Just… I'll see you later." They hung up and she tossed the phone in the passenger's seat, unscrewing the tank cover and swiping her card. She leaned against the car as she squeezed the trigger, staring at the various graffiti decorations on and around the pump. She generally wouldn't stop for gas in this part of town—she usually took the interstate around these neighborhoods on her way home from work—but this afternoon she was pressed for time and traffic was bad. Booth had been stressing about this dinner for the entire week, and had spent all morning at breakfast reminding her about it.

Suddenly someone jumped out at her from around the other side of the gas pump and grabbed her arm, taking her by surprise, and she let out a startled yell. The perpetrator stumbled back against the side of her car, and began to laugh raucously.

"I got you!" he yelled, hardly able to speak from laughing so hard. She put a hand on her chest and felt her racing heart, and shook her head, unable to stop smiling despite her shock.

"God, Jamal, you scared me!" she said, feeling her adrenaline rush abate, replaced with a slow-dawning joy. It had been over a month since she had waved goodbye to the boy in the social services parking lot, and now he stood in front of her again, as if he had simply fallen out of the sky. When he finally got control of himself, he stood before her with his arms crossed, as was typical of him, surveying her.

"Whatcha doin' here?" he asked.

"Filling up my gas tank, what does it look like I'm doing?" she asked, still unable to control the stupid smile that had plastered itself across her face. He rolled his eyes.

"I didn't mean _that_," he said. "I got eyes. I meant, what you doin' at _this_ gas station? This ain't by yo' house."

"It's on the way," she said, letting the nozzle sit in the car even though it had long since finished fuelling up. "The short way, to get around all the downtown traffic." Jamal nodded, having uncrossed his arms and hooked his thumbs through his belt loops.

"Gotcha," he said, brushing past her and removing the nozzle from the car, placing it back in the cradle. It was one of the things he had always liked to do when he lived with her—they would take the car to the gas station to fill up the tank, and he would beg for her to let him put the gas in the car. She thought it was a peculiar request, but she let him, and it turned into a routine of theirs. She would sit in the car and he would take the money to the cashier, then pump the gas into the vehicle, all while she sat and watched bemusedly.

"So, what are you doing here?" she asked, looking around for his aunt's beat-up car. His shoulders bounced up and down.

"I'unno," he said. "Hangin' out."

"At a gas station?" she asked.

"No, at the fair," he quipped, grinning wickedly. She gave him a look, but it was supremely ineffective due to her unrelenting smile. Nothing could wipe it from her features at that moment.

"Ha ha," she said. "Does your aunt know you're here?" He nodded, pulling a pack of gum and a book of stamps out of one of his deep jean pockets.

"She sent me for stamps," he explained. "An' I got gum with the change. Want some?" Brennan declined and he shrugged, unwrapping a piece and cramming it into his mouth. The air between them stung with cinnamon and gasoline. Brennan disliked the idea of sending a child Jamal's age to a gas station by himself, particularly in a neighborhood such as this one, but knew it was not her call to make. Not anymore.

"You can gimme a ride home?" he asked suddenly, brows raised to confirm that it was indeed a question and not a statement. The memory of Booth's dinner with his boss's boss's boss briefly crossed her mind, and then was banished.

"Yes," she said. "I'd love to." Jamal pumped his fist and ran around to the other side of the car, letting himself in. Brennan sent Booth a text before she pulled out onto the road, a brief but loaded message: "Taking Jamal home, can't make dinner." Almost instantly he sent back an "OK" and she knew he understood her absence. It was one of his hallmarks—that understanding of priorities—and it was one of the things she truly loved about him.

Jamal pointed her down a labyrinth of streets that lead her deep into the heart of a neighborhood the city had all but forgotten. The roads were pitted and cracked, and while much of the neighborhood was government-sponsored project housing, it didn't look like codes enforcement had taken a look at any of these buildings in years. Slowly they moved past the project buildings and crossed into another section of the neighborhood that seemed to be slightly nicer duplexes and apartments.

Jamal instructed her to pull into the parking lot of a small single-story apartment complex within the neighborhood. There were a few cars and several bikes in the parking lot, and if Brennan had bothered to do the math, she would have found that her one car had a higher value than all the rest of the vehicles combined, bicycles included. The U-shaped building itself were in dire need of a new paint job, and sheets of varying patterns hung in most of the windows in place of blinds or true curtains. Despite the dilapidated condition of the complex, though, the small plots of grass in front of the units were mostly taken care of, many scattered with lawn chairs, some with forgotten children's toys lying in the dirt.

She followed Jamal to a heavy door that had "104" painted across the top of the doorway, the way one would paint a house number on a street curb. He opened the unlocked door and beckoned her into the apartment, and she followed him nervously, unsure of how his aunt would take to finding her there. Would she be insulted, or angered, to find her nephew's ex foster parent in her home unannounced? Just as she thought she should turn and leave, she heard the woman's voice booming from the kitchen.

"Jamal, you got the stamps?" she yelled over the TV that blared in the sparsely decorated living room. Two small girls—they were perhaps three and five—sat cross-legged on the floor in front of it, mesmerized as the Yo Gabba Gabba theme song played. Jamal grabbed Brennan by the hand and lead her into the kitchen, where she was once again face-to-face with his aunt. The woman sat at the dining room table, snapping the ends off of green beans methodically—ends in the trash can, beans in the bowl on the table.

"Jamal, I need you to—" She stopped half-way through her sentence, taken aback by the unexpected visitor. Brennan opened her mouth to speak but was unsure of what to say. _Hi, I picked up your nephew at a sketchy gas station where he was hanging out without parental supervision._ Somehow she didn't think that would be well-received. Jamal spared either of them from having to speak, though.

"Auntie, look, I seen Doc at the gas station an' she gimme a ride home," he explained, tossing the booklet of stamps on the kitchen counter. Talia processed for a moment, and then her look of uncertainty was replaced by a warm smile.

"Well alright!" she said, standing from where she sat at the kitchen table and wiping her hands on her apron, holding one out to Brennan. "I 'member you, Dr. Brennan ain'it?"

"Yes," she said. "And you're Talia?"

"Uh huh," she said, stepping into the doorway between the kitchen and living room. "Y'all git in here!" The two girls jumped up and scurried into the kitchen, looking up at Brennan cautiously when they realized she was there. She didn't blame them—she knew they had been in the system when Talia was undergoing drug rehabilitation, they had good reason to be suspicious of strangers in their home.

"This is Dr. Brennan," Talia introduced. "She the lady who took Jamal for a while. Dr. Brennan—"

"Temperance," she offered, abnormally uncomfortable with her own esteemed title in this setting.

"Temperance," Talia corrected. "These's my girls, Shante and Jakya. Y'all be nice an' say hello."

"Hi," they said in unison, the younger Shante hiding behind her older sister, who still gave Brennan a hard look. The resemblance between Jakya and Jamal was stunning—their creamy brown tone, their identical eyes and noses, and the distrusting look she gave him was one straight out of the little boy's repertoire. They could easily pass for siblings. Shante was much darker, like Talia, and built more like a linebacker than her willowy sister and cousin. Brennan returned their greeting and, satisfied, the girls shuffled back into the living room, which was empty save for one couch, one chair, and a small television sitting on an end table against the far wall. Plain white sheets covered the windows, and the walls were bare but spotless. From what Brennan could see of the apartment, Talia kept it extremely clean, even if very sparsely furnished.

"You go on," Talia said to Jamal, who was standing around in the kitchen with the two women. "'Less you wanna snap beans!" Jamal made a disgusted face and left, throwing himself down on the couch in the living room and changing the channel, to the outraged cries of his younger cousins. Talia let out a loud warning, and the fussing stopped immediately.

"You jus' gonna stand there an' look pretty or you gon' help?" Talia asked, using her foot to push a chair out from underneath the small table. She was still in her Merry Maid's uniform, the same one Brennan had seen her in the day she took Jamal, right down to the worn-out sneakers. Brennan took the seat offered to her and went to work on the legumes, and found that she was not nearly as quick at it as Talia was.

"What are you making?" Brennan asked, partly out of curiosity and partly for conversation's sake.

"Snap beans 'n ham," Talia said. "Was gon' make potatoes too but I ain't got the time for it. Been so busy, hardly got time to get anything done. You stayin' to eat?" Brennan was surprised by the offer, and answered hesitantly.

"I don't want to impose…"

"Oh hush," Talia said, waving her off and smiling. They worked quietly together at the table, and Brennan occasionally looked up and surveyed Talia with interest. The women seemed to be within two or three years of each other in age, but life had taken much more of a toll on Talia than Brennan. Whether it was her past drug use or the daily labor of her job, or both, she appeared older, and physically worn down.

"He been talkin' 'bout you," Talia said out of the blue a few minutes later. Brennan looked up.

"Me?" Talia nodded.

"He think a lot of you," she said. "Him an' me both." Brennan snapped a bean and smiled, tossing the ends in the trash can between them.

"Thank you," she said.

"No," Talia said, reaching across the trash can and grabbing Brennan's hand in hers. "Thank _you_. You took damn fine care'a him when he ain't had nobody. All that stuff you give 'im—you ain't had to, but you did it anyway. You took him an' treated him like he was yours, made him feel like he belong." Talia paused for a moment, giving herself time to regain her composure, then continued.

"He like a son to me, you know? His momma died when he was five—my brother ain't wanna raise a kid so I took him up. After I went to the clinic, they made Jamal's daddy take 'im 'cause he ain't had nowhere else to go. Then after he went to jail… I tell you, I was _sick_ worryin' 'bout him, just sick with it. Didn't know where he was, who had him, if they was treatin' 'im right… same as my girls, just made me sick to think about." Brennan felt a deep empathy for the woman—over the past month she had often found herself consumed with wondering the same things about Jamal, and she'd only had him for three months. This woman had raised him as her own son for five years.

"That's what got me clean," Talia said. "Had their pictures stuck up on my mirror at the clinic, all three of 'em. Every day I'd look at myself in the mirror an' see them lookin' back at me, an' no matter how bad it was, I had to do right by them. Crack was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life, an' I almost lost everything 'cause of it. Thank God I got it back." Brennan didn't know what to say. She stared at Talia, working her bottom lip between her teeth, trying to conjure up something meaningful to respond with.

"You are an impressive woman," she finally said. "I very rarely say that to people, because I'm not impressed by others all that often. But you've endured incredibly difficult situations in your life to take care of your family… of all of your family… and that impresses me, and I respect that highly." Talia smiled widely at her, and she returned it.

"Who'd'a ever thought?" Talia asked nobody in particular. "The day I'd be sittin' in my kitchen, makin' friends with some rich white lady snappin' my beans and tellin' me she think I'm impressive. I tell ya, God is good and He's in a good mood!" She slapped her knees and laughed unabashedly, and Brennan couldn't help but join in. Religious beliefs notwithstanding, Talia was right; the scenario was one that Brennan never would have envisioned herself taking part of.

Within an hour the beans were steamed, the ham was fried, biscuits had risen in the heat of the oven, and the small dinette table was set with an extra place. Having forgotten their previous apprehensions, Shante and Jakya battled Jamal for Brennan's attention, telling jokes and stories at a high volume across the table. Talia took her seat and the kids settled immediately, clasping their hands in their laps and bowing their heads. To be polite, Brennan mimicked the motion, but kept her eyes open.

"Lord," Talia began, "Thank you for this blessed day—for a roof over our heads and food on the table, and mostly for all us sittin' here tonight. You sending Temperance here today was a true blessing and we thank you for her, and hope she know that she's always welcome in this house." Brennan looked up, and was surprised to find that while all of the children's heads were bowed, Talia was staring directly at her from across the table, smiling warmly.

"Amen," Talia finished, giving Brennan a slight nod.

"Amen," the children chorused, snatching their forks up off the table and digging into their plates.

After the table was cleared and the dishes were done, Brennan insisted that she had to head home to console Booth after leaving him alone with his higher-ups. Jamal convinced her to stay for a round of Spoons, which she did, and finally they let her go. The entire group walked her out to her car, bidding her a noisy goodbye in an otherwise quiet night.

"You come back on Sunday," Talia said, leaning in through Brennan's car window as she cranked the ignition. "We usually eat 'round four, after church. And bring a dessert, pie or somethin', a'ight?"

"Are you sure?" Brennan asked. Talia gave her a look that clearly suggested she should stop asking that question.

"Y'all want Aunt Tempe to come back on Sunday?" Talia asked the children, who exploded with loud confirmations. Talia turned back to Brennan. "That good enough?"

"Yes," Brennan said, her cheeks actually sore from the amount of smiling she had done that evening. "I'll see you on Sunday, then." They said their goodbyes and she pulled out of the complex parking lot, navigating her way out of the crowded neighborhood and back onto the main road.

Half-way to Booth's place, she realized she was still smiling.


	17. Feel What It's Like to Be New

**A/N:** I'm glad you guys liked the last chapter! See, nothing to be afraid of. With that said, I haven't entirely emptied out my bag of tricks... hence the last few chapters of this fic. A fic that just got a chapter longer than I expected, by the way, because this chapter kind of wrote itself without my planning or consent. That tends to happen to me though, so I've learned to just roll with it. Like I've said in the past... sometimes your Muse takes you on a detour, and you just have to kick back and enjoy the view. Let me know what you think. :)

* * *

_All of these lines across my face  
Tell you the story of who I am  
So many stories of where I've been  
And how I got to where I am_

_But these stories don't mean anything  
When you've got no one to tell them to  
It's true, I was made for you..._

_- The Story, Brandi Carlile_

* * *

Booth's apartment was dimly lit when Brennan let herself in with her key, opening and shutting the door quietly even though it was hardly past nine. The night felt longer, and it seemed later to her than it actually was. She had that giddy slipping-in feeling that teenagers get when they creep into their parents' house at two in the morning, wild and buzzing and exhausted all at once. In high school she had never experienced that feeling—having had neither friends nor a parent's home to sneak into—but if she had known it then, she would see the similarity.

When she rounded the corner from the entry into the living room, she was surprised to see Booth sitting on his own couch, loosening his tie. She hadn't seen his car parked in the street below, but maybe she just hadn't been paying attention. She had so many strange, almost giddy thoughts bouncing around the inside of her head, she was surprised she had made it home at all. It was like being on a caffeine rush, the bubbling overflow of emotion that she finally identified as sheer joy. That was it, that had defined her night—joy.

She stepped hesitantly into the room, unsure if Booth would be in a foul mood about her leaving him all alone with his higher-ups. He had not argued or been upset with her when she sent him the text earlier, but it was difficult to ascertain the tone behind a text message. When she thought about it, she wasn't even that good at ascertaining the meaning of tonal cues when she was talking face-to-face with someone, so the realm of emotive texting was far beyond her.

"Hey," she said, announcing her presence. He looked up and gave her an exhausted smile, tie still in hand. From the look on his face, she gathered it had been a very, very long night. Since he did not appear angry, she padded soundlessly across the wood floor—having left her shoes at the front door, something she did habitually and the only person to ever do so in Booth's house—and landed lightly on the couch next to him, folding her legs up underneath her and leaning into his chest. He groaned and rearranged himself so that he could comfortably wrap his arms around her, breathing her in.

"You look happy," he said, having taken note of her smile and something else—something about her that wasn't easily verbalized, but easily seen. Maybe her step, or the way she carried herself, or the easy contentment of her features. She closed her eyes and hmmed.

"I am," she said. "You look tired, how was dinner?"

"Exhausting," he replied, letting his tie fly to the opposite end of the couch. It landed on the arm, then gravity took over and it slid down to the floor. Oh well, he'd pick it up later. He had barely made it through the door before he'd kicked his shoes off, and the black suit jacket was lying limp over the back of one of the dinette chairs. If he hadn't been so drained, physically and mentally, he would have taken all the articles to his bedroom and disposed of them accordingly. Instead he let them land where they might, and would deal with them in the morning.

"What happened? What did it end up being about?" she asked. The reason for the dinner had never been explained to Booth, only that his presence was required, which had lead to a week of poor sleep for the both of them—he spent most nights staring at the ceiling, wondering if he was about to be fired for one too many misconducts, and she just didn't sleep well knowing he wasn't. It was like contagious insomnia.

"Well, when I first got there, they acted like it was just dinner, you know?" he explained, lazily running his fingers up and down the length of her back as he talked. "Everybody got drinks, the food came, and nobody talked about anything important. It was all like, football and politics, just table talk. Meanwhile I feel like I'm on the chopping block and I'm just waiting for the ax to come down, I actually had to excuse myself at one point 'cause I thought I was going to barf."

"That sounds unpleasant," Brennan sympathized. He nodded.

"Yeah," he said. "So anyway, we literally get through the salads, through the steaks, and the waitress is asking us if we want dessert before Dicasa, Cullen's boss, looks over at me and says he just wants a coffee, we won't be there much longer. So now I'm thinking, wow, I'm really getting fired, this was my Last Supper, you know?"

"You're comparing your job dismissal to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ?" Brennan asked. Booth looked scandalized.

"What? No! I'm just… it's just a figure of speech, Bones," he defended.

"I see," she said. "So, did they fire you?"

"You don't sound that worried about it," he said, brows furrowed.

"Well, ideally I would prefer to keep working cases with you," she said. "But it's not as if I would never see you again if you lost your job at the FBI. We're not just partners anymore. I would simply have to contend with seeing you less often throughout the day than I'm accustomed to. It would be a minor annoyance, but certainly not the end of the world."

"Would you keep working murder cases without me?" he asked. She shook her head.

"No."

"Really?"

"Definitely not," she said. "As much as I enjoy solving murders, I wouldn't feel comfortable doing the job with anyone but you. In the past when I've had to work with other agents on cases—Perotta, Sulley—it just wasn't the same."

"Even ol' Sulley didn't measure up, huh?" Booth asked. She shook her head and pecked his cheek affectionately.

"Nope," she said. "He didn't. Why do you think I didn't get on that boat?" Booth nodded wisely, pulling her closer and finding her lips.

"Well, just so you know, I didn't get fired," he said when he pulled away. She grinned.

"That's a relief," she said. "So why did they ask you to dinner?"

"Well," he said, "after the coffee came, Cullen told me that he and Dicasa had been reviewing my work as a Special Agent, and that they were really impressed. They want to promote me."

"To what?" she asked, not really surprised. It was no secret that Booth was good at his job—objectively he was a good agent with a high success rate and a natural ability to work with people.

"They want me to be the Supervisor of the Organized Crime Section," he said. "They said when the position opened up, they remembered my work on Kirby's case, uncovering all that mess, and they wanted me for the job. I guess I have your dad to thank for that, huh?"

"I guess so," she said. "Did you take the position?"

"Well, they gave me time to think it over," he said. "They just want to know by next week, my decision."

"Do you think you'll accept it?" she asked. He shrugged.

"Eh, I dunno," he said, in a dismissive tone that suggested he had already made his decision.

"It would be a definite step up," Brennan pointed out. "More respect within the social stratification of the Bureau, higher pay, and they'd probably get you a better chair." She smiled and he realized she was actually employing sarcasm, effectively. He laughed.

"Oh, well, the chair seals the deal," he said, letting his laugher fade into a sigh. "I don't think I'm going to take the offer. I like being a Special Agent, I like being out in the field doing my thing, you know? If they bump me up to Supervisor, I'm just going to be doing a lot of paperwork. There's a reason they give those guys the nice chairs; they're in them all the time." Brennan listened as he spoke, watching him softly. She knew how much he loved his job—it was one of the things that made him who he was, that he identified himself by. Taking that from him would be like taking a part of who he was, and she understood that. It would be like making her a publishing editor for an Anthropology journal—sure, it would be in her field, but it wasn't what she loved about it. She wouldn't feel like an anthropologist anymore, just like sitting at a desk would take the 'agent' out of Booth.

"I understand," she said, and he smiled because he knew she really did.

"So you don't care if I'm just a Special Agent for the rest of my life?" Booth asked.

"Well rationally, you can't be a Special Agent forever. Eventually you won't be able to handle the physical requirements of the job, and you'll be forced into a supervisory position that's less physically demanding, leaving the field work to the younger, stronger agents that will come after you." Booth frowned, making a grouchy noise.

"Gee, thanks Bones," he said. "Way to make me feel old."

"Well, given your excellent physical condition, I imagine it will be quite a few years before that happens," she said, laying a hand on his chest and feeling it rise and fall underneath her.

"Thanks," he said. "That is, unless I'm stuck in therapy for the rest of my life. Then I'll never get back in the field."

"Any idea when Sweets is going to clear you to return to work?" she asked.

"Soon, actually," Booth said. "Last time I saw him, he said he thought we'd be done by the end of the month. He won't give me a real time-table though, you know how he is. _It depends on your progress._ I'm afraid the Bureau's gonna cut off my paid leave soon if he doesn't hurry up and clear me."

"Well, you can always come live with me if you get evicted from your apartment," Brennan offered, and Booth grinned.

"Gee, thanks," he said, mussing her hair and earning a playful scowl. "And I could wear an apron and have dinner on the table for you when you get home from work, too."

"That would be nice," she said, trying to feign seriousness and failing miserably.

"What do I look like, June Cleaver?" he asked, and Brennan made a face.

"I don't know what that means," she said.

"Oh come _on_ Bones, don't tell me you've never seen Leave it to Beaver? You know, Beaver Cleaver, his brother Wally, his parents Ward and June… they're like, the archetypical American family in the nineteen fifties."

"Never seen it," she said. He rolled his eyes.

"You're an alien," he said. "You know that? An alien."

"I am not!"

"Yes you are! That's why you don't know anything about pop culture, it's because you're not one of us. I think secretly you're a scaly green monster masquerading as a disarmingly sexy earthling…" He sat up suddenly and turned them both over, so that she was now underneath him, and began to tickle her sides mercilessly. It was something very few people knew about Temperance Brennan—she was one of the most ticklish people on the planet. Tears of laughter sprang up in her eyes as she howled and begged him to stop, thrashing and squirming but unable to release herself from his hostage.

"Say uncle!" he shouted over her pleas, and she gave him a perplexed look as she tried in vain to knock his hands away from her sides.

"What?" she asked, gasping for air.

"Say uncle," he repeated, letting his fingers scuttle up her sides to her armpits, then up around her neck and back down again.

"Why?" she asked, bringing her shoulders up to her ears in an attempt to shield her neck.

"Just do it!" he shouted, intensifying his attack.

"Fine, uncle! Uncle, uncle, uncle!" she shouted, and was relieved when Booth stopped tickling her and sat up, crossing his arms over his chest and looking down at his previously captive prey. She continued to laugh nervously, in the uncontrollable way one does when tickled to their breaking point, and took relieved gulps of air.

"That," she said between breaths, "was not fair."

"Hey, I can't help that I'm not ticklish," Booth said smugly. She gave him a look of wicked contemplation.

"You just wait," she said, sitting up in her seat and running her fingers through her hair, untangling it. "You're going to wake up one morning with a blow-up clown lying in bed next to you instead of me."

"Hey, that's not funny," he said, tone suddenly serious, pointing a finger at her.

"Really?" she smirked. "Because I think I would find it extremely amusing."

"That's not very nice," he said, leaning back against the couch and draping an arm around her, pulling her into his side. She gave him a wary look.

"You're not going to tickle me again, are you?" she asked.

"Nah," he said, letting her rest her head on his shoulder where it had grown accustomed to being. "I wouldn't want you to get too pissed and decide to vaporize me with your alien powers."

"You're just afraid I'm not bluffing about the clown," she said with a smirk.

"Yeah, that too." He leaned in and kissed her temple. "So what happened with Jamal? Where'd you find him?"

Brennan launched into the story, explaining everything from the sneak attack at the gas pump to her heart-to-heart with Talia, and the invitation for dinner on Sunday. Booth watched her eyes light up and her hands dance in front of her as she talked—when she really got into a story, her hands did just as much talking as her mouth did—and the happiness exuding from her was palpable. When she finished the story, her hands rested in her lap and she looked down at her upturned palms, like she held the world there.

"How does it happen like that?" she asked, looking over and up slightly at Booth, who still had his arm around her.

"Like what?" he asked.

"I never thought I would see him again, but after a completely random series of unrelated events, there he was. If it had been any other day, if I had gone any other way home, if I had been five minutes earlier or later, I might have never seen him again."

"It's called fate, Bones," Booth said, squeezing her shoulder gently. "There are no accidents—everything happens for a reason."

"That's not true," she argued. "Every act in the universe stands alone, and while some people may follow a chain of events that eventually culminates in some 'fated' climax and call it an act of the supernatural, rationally speaking the idea of predestination doesn't exist. After all, it only takes one slight adjustment to change the entire course of a so-called 'fate'."

"That's what makes it fate, though," Booth explained. "_Because_ it only takes one little thing to change the entire outcome, because it can so easily be altered by the most inconsequential, meaningless happening… that's what makes it more than just a, a sequence of unrelated events. That's what makes it more than a coincidence. That's what makes it fate."

"So you really believe that?" Brennan asked. "You really believe there's some incomprehensible, interwoven chain of events that spans the entire history of existence, that accounts for every action, for every individual, for every cause and effect that ever came to be?" He looked at her for a moment, really looked at her, before answering.

"Every moment we ever had, as individuals, as partners, as human beings, lead to this one," he said. "Every action of our parents, of our grandparents, of every person who ever lived before us, was a part of the chain. Every word they said, every move they made, every legacy they left behind, is all part of this. You, me, everything about this moment, in this place, at this time—" he gestured around them, at the room and the world at large. "—could never have happened unless everything that happened before us, happened exactly the way it did, when it did. If one thing had changed, _this_ might have never existed." His voice was quiet but commanding, and stirred something deep in her. She felt each word like a current, like the words had their own energy, their own medium.

"I… never thought about it that way before," she admitted, taken by the poignancy and depth of his words, his ideas, and the possibilities behind them.

"Now you have," Booth said. "And this—this moment when you think about it, when you feel it—could be the moment that changes everything. You just never know."


	18. Keep Your Head and Drop the Gun

**A/N:** This has been such a weird, warped, depersonalized sort of week for me. That probably reflects in this chapter. Speaking of this chapter, big thanks to Melissa for helping me hash out the timeline. You know how I am with numbers. :) Also thanks to her for giving me the clever idea of bypassing the Document Manager not working when I wanted to post this chapter. Anyway, I told you my goody bag wasn't empty yet... so enjoy the chapter, and let me know what you think.

* * *

_Old pale memories of someone you knew  
Keep crawling through the back of your mind (stealing time)  
In the daylight you're crossing all your wires  
You never knew just how to put out a fire  
The closet's been shaking with bones  
Little reminders that you're out on your own..._

_- Today Will Be Better, I Swear!, Stars  
_

* * *

Booth rolled over in bed and stretched his arm out, seeking the sleeping lump that was at his side in the morning more often than not. She had become a security blanket of sorts—something he could hold onto in the night, breathe in her light scent, like tea and cold rain, and just generally fill the space between his arms. If he'd had a long day he liked to curl up next to her and run his fingers through her hair or up and down her arm, like a worry stone, until his anxiety evaporated.

This morning, though, she wasn't there. He moved his hand blindly in the area where she should've been, then lifted his head slightly and opened his eyes. Her side of the bed was made, her phone removed from the opposite nightstand. He grinned inwardly—_her _side of the bed. She even referred to it as that once, as hers, and they both caught it and smiled.

He found her note on the kitchen counter—_Gone to work, good luck with Sweets. Love, T._ He screwed his eyes shut and made an unhappy sound. He was always able to put his therapy sessions out of his mind until the morning of, when, like summer storm clouds gathering overhead, he would remember with just enough time to throw on some clothes and drive across town to the psychologist's office. He did just that, rubbing gel into his hair as he took the stairs in twos, and made it to Sweets's building with even a few minutes to spare.

"Agent Booth, you're on time," Sweets said, the position of the hands on the plain-faced clock in his office not having gone unnoticed.

"Yeah, well, the sooner we get in, the sooner we get done, right?" he grumbled.

"That's one way to look at it," Sweets said, flipping open Booth's file and scanning it for a moment before speaking again. "Last time we spoke, we talked about your experiences in high school. It seems you turned a lot of your rage outward at your classmates and athletic opponents." Booth made an uncommitted gesture, somewhere between a shrug and a head incline.

"Sometimes, maybe," he said. Sweets gave him a look.

"Agent Booth, you were suspended from your high school twice for physical fighting, and have a long record of other altercations and misconducts that didn't result in suspension. Loud verbal arguments, threats, destruction of private property…"

"Lemme see that," Booth said, trying to snatch the file from Sweets's hands. He was a few inches short in his attempt, though, and the psychologist scooted his chair back a nudge, shaking his head.

"It's your permanent record from high school," Sweets explained. "I submitted a request for it a while back, the school finally faxed it to me. I didn't think they kept these things for so long…"

"It wasn't that long ago!" Booth defended. "I graduated in eighty-nine, that was only, what… oh," he said, realizing he had reached the twenty-year mark. Wow, maybe it had been a long time since he'd been in high school. Sweets only smirked in response.

"Anyway," he said. "You had quite a list of offenses against you during your freshman and sophomore years of high school. When you entered your junior year, though, eighty-seven to eighty-eight, there was a drastic drop in behavioral referrals. What happened?"

"I started thinking," Booth said plainly. "A lot of colleges won't offer athletic scholarships to screw-offs who get suspended all the time for fighting. They don't want that kind of energy on the team."

"So you were pursuing an athletic scholarship for college?" Sweets asked, and Booth nodded. "In what, football?"

"Nah," Booth said. "Basketball. I was doing football in the fall, basketball in the spring, up 'til my junior year. Then I decided I wanted to go all the way with basketball, so I quit with football and put all my time into getting really good at basketball. I wasn't as big then as I am now," Booth said with a nostalgic half-smile. "I was still pretty slim, and fast. I got really good at it."

"Did you end up getting the athletic scholarship?" Sweets asked. Booth nodded.

"Yep, full ride."

"But you only went two years before you joined the army in ninety-one," Sweets recalled from his earlier notes. "What happened?"

"My shoulder crapped out on me," Booth said, subconsciously placing his hand on his trapezium muscle and rubbing its length. "They did surgery, but it took too long to heal. I wasn't ever at one-hundred percent after that, and they yanked the scholarship. I couldn't afford college without the scholarship, you know?" Sweets nodded, closing the high school file.

"So you joined the army after your shoulder injury healed?" Sweets prompted.

"Yeah," he said. "They let me ride out the rest of the semester, finish my classes and all while my shoulder healed. That fall I enlisted, and barely turned around before they had me deployed."

"Desert Storm?" Sweets asked.

"At first, yeah," he said. "I did time there, worked my way up, after two years they made me a Ranger. Once I proved I was good with a sniper rifle they had me all over. By the mid nineties I was in Bosnia, and that was my last mission."

"Then you came home?" Sweets asked. Booth sighed.

"Then I came home."

oOoOoOoOo

Seeley Booth leaned back into the jet's stiff-backed seat, sliding the window cover down. They were flying west with the sun, so no matter how many hours they were in the sky, it never seemed to grow any darker. He'd been in the same fatigues for two days now, and found that there could be no more fitting name than 'fatigues', as the word completely expressed his mental and physical state. Though it had been days, or weeks, it seemed like only moments ago that he watched the man fall through his rifle scope, blood spurting forth from his torn body, a young child in a party hat hysterical at his father's side. He could not hear their screams, but he could feel them—deep down, he could feel every one of them.

He slid the window covering back up, staring out at the sun. He stared directly into it, until his eyes could no longer take the abuse and shut without his consent. If only he could burn the image out of his head. If only he could stare at the sun long enough, and burn everything.

This was his last mission—he was done. They had gutted him, taken out the humanness and replaced it with a murderous Pavlovian reflex. He didn't have to think about it anymore—if he saw a shadow in the corner of his vision, he reached for something to kill it with. If there was a stir in the night, he readied himself for an ambush attack. It was a reaction, a conditioned response—it was no more a part of him than an exhaled breath. It became as reflexive as breathing. _Just something you do._

Now when he looked in the mirror, he didn't see himself anymore. Hell, he couldn't even see his eyes anymore. He had no eyes. Humans have eyes; it's where the soul dwells. There was no soul. There were no eyes. There was only the hollowness, the echo of what once was, reverberating within every time he saw his reflected self, or non-self. The non-self he wanted to rip from him, and burn it, too. He just wanted to burn.

And suddenly now they put him, them, on a jet, and send them home as if none of this had ever transpired. Months of training, of mental conditioning, of senseless violence, all for naught. Now they were supposed to 'go back', to find the human they once were and replace that fallen part of them. The thinking part, the beating part, the part they were ordered to throw out, or tuck away neatly under a stone in the desert somewhere. Hide it, toss it, drown it, set it on fire, just get rid of it.

Because that part is pesky—that part gets in the way. When a living, breathing human being comes into the focus of your gun, that part of you says, _For Christ's sake, that's a person, don't kill them._ The military greatly dislikes that part, because it undermines the objective. Conscience is not the objective. Soul is not the objective. These are just nuisances, pesky hindrances that cannot be exploited for any good and thus must be removed from the equation.

Once that part is muted out—the conscious, the second thought—man's more primal instincts take control. When a Marine enters an unsecured combat zone—_first to fly, first to die_—every shot they fire is an unthinking defensive reaction, an extension of their own sympathetic nervous system. Fight or flight. They are moving targets, and their aim is survival. It's a lot easier to kill another human being when they're trying to kill you. You can sleep with that at night—you can lie awake and whisper to God, remind Him, _They tried to kill me first._ Front-lines combat is an appeal to the most primordial of human instincts, the survival instinct, and it works. It's worked for thousands of years, and if it ain't broke, why fix it?

Take a man off the front line, though, and it's different. The previously conditioned shoot first, think later response has to be tamed, refined for a new target. The beast has to be brought out of the wild and enlightened—but only a little. Only just enough to teach him pause, to teach him restraint. _Don't kill everything,_ the beast must learn, _only the intended target._ Don't shoot wantonly into the dark when you hear a stray footfall, only to later realize it was a civilian child wandering home. Now you have but one bullet, but one opportunity, and you must be perfect. You must become not just a killer, but a skilled killer—an assassin. But they won't call you that. The enemies are assassins. You're a sniper. It's different, even if only semantically.

Booth had always prided himself on his skill, no matter what the venue. If there was a job doing, it was worth doing it well. He had been the best basketball player, the best ice cream scooper at Carvel, the best soldier he could be. He had been the best killer he could be, and he was good at it. Maybe that bothered him most—not that he did it, but that he did it so well. That he could so easily play God, so easily pick off human souls like quail fluttering through the underbrush. He didn't think of them as people though, not when he pulled the trigger. Maybe that was the worst part of all.

He looked at the men around him, some sleeping, some tangled in thought. The ones who were awake, who were too haunted to sleep, all appeared to be fighting the same struggle inside of them. How do you piece together what was torn apart, tossed into the sand and buried by a desert wind? How do you consolidate the human you were, and the monster you became? How can you live when the two are so inextricably bound, that you yourself are unsure as to where one ends and the other begins. Does one end? Does the other begin? Which one of these people are you, or can you call yourself a person at all anymore? By taking the souls of so many, did you inadvertently throw away your own?

Where did you go, and when are you coming back?

Without him realizing it the plane had landed, and Seeley seemed to wander down the ramp towards the terminal, as if he had no real idea where he was going or why. Like he needed directions back to the civilian world, a navigator to get him there.

Excited voices carried down the ramp, and some men began to pick up the pace, faces pulled tight into smiles. Voices they could hardly recognize, kept safely hidden in the backs of their minds for this moment. Voices that signified all the normalcy they had lost, waiting to be found again at the end of the corridor.

They stood in clusters as the men exited the ramp, brandishing American flags and homemade signs, tear-streaked faces and impatient, wriggling children fighting for release. They stood apart, almost as two segregated groups—soldiers on one side, civilians on the other—until a knee-high young girl with curly red hair made a break from the group, tackling her father around the knees and letting out a squeal. It was all they needed, and families rushed forth, claiming their kin from the ravages of war.

Booth stood back from the group, watching as children reunited with fathers, wives with husbands, mothers with sons. It should have been beautiful, heart-wrenching even, but he didn't feel either of those things. It only took one scan of the crowd to know who _wasn't_ there, who he hadn't expected to show up in the first place. That hadn't stopped was left of his heart to long for it, to dream about it, to imagine it during the scarce empty moments of war.

He had seen himself sauntering down the ramp, heavy boots thudding with each step, Bosnian dirt still clinging to the treads on the soles. He had seen himself stepping out into the terminal, separating himself from his men as he looked out into the welcoming crowd. He had seen, in the far back, his father's broad shoulders standing a head above everyone else, chiseled face split into an approving grin. He had seen Jared standing at their father's side, having somehow gotten a break from basic training to see his big brother return home safely. He had even seen his grandfather, slightly stooped, standing at a bit of a distance from the other two, eyes wet with pride.

But he didn't see any of those things, not really. He saw the crowd thin, then eventually clear out completely. He saw the rows of empty waiting chairs, seeming to wait themselves. He saw the sky beyond the windows, beyond the strip, burn up bright orange and pink, smoldering slowly until they were snuffed out by the stealth of night.

He watched the sky burn out into darkness, alone, and wanted more than anything to burn with it.

* * *

**A/N:** I want to be clear here - I have nothing but the utmost admiration of and respect for the United States military, or any military allied to our cause for that matter. Serving our country in the military is one of the highest calls of duty one can answer to. That said, I do not support the war in Iraq, or war in general, but I support the brave men and women of the military 110 percent. So what you've read in this chapter is my strong distaste for the byproducts of war, not those serving.


	19. We Never Win, But the Battle Wages On

**A/N:** Sooo you're going to be mad at me twice (maybe three times). First of all, it's been two weeks since I updated this. Sorry! I just kept not being inspired to write this chapter, and then when I was, other things came up. Excuses, excuses, I know. Secondly, this chapter is really short. I was going to write more, but I decided to postpone it until the next chapter, so it would all be more cohesive. Also I have to go to the hospital tomorrow and get like seventeen different tests run on my brain (okay I'm exaggerating the number, but barely, they told me to expect to be there for at least 7-8 hours) so I'm kind of distracted by that and unable to write anything sufficient. (More excuses, I know.)

So that's that. Hopefully you enjoy what little there is to this chapter, and be patient... the next three weeks are hell for me, but after that I'll have plenty of time to write! I actually have full intentions to pick up _The Hands in the Snow_ again after I finish this off (in 2-3 chapters, possibly 4... this keeps getting longer than I had ever imagined it being) and work on that, which many of you have been asking about. I didn't forget about it, I promise! Anyway, enjoy this chapter, and let me know what you think. :)

* * *

_If I had just one wish  
Only one demand  
I hope he's not like me  
I hope he understands  
That he can take this life  
And hold it by the hand  
And he can greet the world  
With arms wide open... _

_- With Arms Wide Open, Creed_

* * *

That Sunday evening Booth and Brennan rode in Booth's SUV towards Talia's apartment. Brennan held a pecan pie in her lap, can of whipped cream rolling around in a plastic bag in the space by her feet. Booth was abnormally quiet. Usually he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as they rode, sometimes whistling a tune or humming along with whatever the all-80s station had playing, but tonight they rode in silence, his eyes fixed on the road, hands firmly grasping the wheel.

He had, in fact, been fairly sullen all weekend, ever since his appointment with Sweets on Friday afternoon. He'd gotten up early Saturday morning and left without leaving a note, which was unlike him. She called him around noon that day, and when his phone went straight to voicemail, she knew he was not in the mood to talk. Nevertheless she left a clipped message telling him to call her later, and she did not see or hear from him again until he returned to his apartment that night.

"Did you have a productive day?" she asked airily as he dropped his keys on the small table by the front door, undoing his belt as he walked across the living room, towards his bedroom door. He looked up, seeming surprised to find her on the couch.

"What? Yeah, I guess," he said, disappearing into his bedroom for a minute before returning in his typical nightwear—boxers and a white sleeveless shirt, which he colloquially referred to as a 'wife-beater' for no reason that she could understand. Tonight was probably not the night to ask, either, as he looked severely preoccupied with something else. He sat on the opposite end of the couch, flicking the television on and effectively tuning out the world.

"Are you hungry?" she asked during the commercial break. "I made a lasagna earlier, I didn't know if you'd be back or not."

"Not really," he said dismissively, not looking in her direction as he answered. Her brows knitted together. What was up with him? If he had been absorbed in a football or hockey game she would be able to understand being blown off—that was, according to Angela, _something all men do_ that she shouldn't take offense to, and she didn't. When she was deeply engrossed in her work, she became highly peeved when he interrupted her with an asinine question about something that could have easily waited until she was finished. But he wasn't watching sports right now, so that excuse was null.

"Well, if you get hungry later, the side with the toothpicks has meat," she said, trying to conceal her mild irritation at his behavior. Obviously something had upset him yesterday, but he wasn't being forthright with any information about it, and she did not want to press him about something he had no interest in discussing. Still, that didn't give him license to be a jerk either.

"Sorry," he sighed, as if he had been able to read her most recent thoughts. "I'm being an asshat, I'm sorry. Thank you for cooking, I'm sure it's great; I'm just really not hungry right now." She nodded, pursing her lips together and deciding not to ask what an 'asshat' was, but to assume it was a self-deprecating statement.

"That's okay," she said. "If something is bothering you, though, I wish you'd discuss it with me instead of acting like this."

"I know," he said, scooting across the couch and pulling her towards him. He pulled the hair-tie out of her hair and ran his fingers through it, feeling some of his tension immediately dissipate. "Just not today, okay? Maybe tomorrow. I just need time to think about it."

"Okay," she said, knowing she would have to understand without understanding for the time being. That was the previous night, and now it was late afternoon the next day and he still hadn't mentioned anything about it. She was having a hard time deciding whether to give him his space about it, or bring it up again. Maybe she'd ask him on their way home from dinner.

Talia greeted them both at the door with a strained smile, still in her church clothes. The small apartment smelled strongly of fried chicken, though when they entered the small room to set the pie down Brennan saw a package of tofu sitting on the counter, apparently unopened.

"I know you don't eat chicken so I got some'a this," Talia said, pointing distastefully to the package in question. "But I dunno how to cook that shit, so you're gonna have to show me how so I can make it right next time." Brennan smiled and thanked her for her thoughtfulness, and while the two women worked on how to properly make fake fried chicken, Booth wandered out the sliding glass door in back of the apartment, into the vacant lot behind it. He stood with his hands in his pockets, peering across the empty space that lead to a fringe of trees, barely blocking the view of another complex of shabby apartments. He could easily spot broken glass glinting in the setting sun's rays, and could only imagine what else lay in wait in the patchy ground cover. In an empty lot like that, hidden from the eyes of the police as they cruised by intermittently, a kid might step on a hypodermic needle if they weren't careful.

"Hey," Booth heard from behind him, the glass door sliding open. Jamal stepped out barefooted onto the slab of concrete that served as a modest patio. Talia hollered something from within the apartment about not paying to air condition the entire outside world, and he hastily shut the door behind him.

"Hey Jamal," Booth acknowledged, lifting a hand in greeting. Jamal scowled.

"What's wrong wichoo A.B.?" he asked, using the moniker he had given Booth not long before he was placed into his aunt's custody. "You look like someone just ran over your dog." Booth couldn't help but smile, shaking his head and looking down at the child, who stood with his arms crossed over his chest, as was typical of him.

"Nothing," Booth said. Jamal sucked his teeth.

"That's a lie," he said plainly, calling Booth out on it. Booth sighed, looking out across the stretch of grass before them. The light had dipped behind the tips of the Virginia pines, casting their spiny shadows far across the clearing.

"Yeah," Booth agreed with a sigh. "Jamal, you love your dad, don't you?" There was silence for a moment, and out of the corner of his eye Booth could see the boy carefully assess the question.

"He's my dad," Jamal replied slowly. "So yeah, I guess so."

"No matter what he does, you'll still love him, won't you?"

"Uh-huh," Jamal said, looping his thumbs on the elastic waistband of his basketball shorts, mirroring Booth's contemplative stare into the distance. "What about you? You love your dad?"

"I do," Booth said quietly.

"What's he like?" Jamal asked. Booth sighed.

"He's not very nice," he finally said. "He was pretty rough on me when I was a kid."

"My dad ain't real nice either," Jamal said. "That don't mean he don't love me. He just mean. Lotsa daddies are."

"They're not supposed to be," Booth said firmly, looking down at the boy, who looked up at him scrutinizingly. "Dads aren't supposed to be mean to their kids, Jamal. The way your dad treated you wasn't okay, and you didn't deserve it. You didn't do anything wrong." Jamal's eyes widened slightly, then narrowed again. They both seemed caught off-guard by Booth's sudden words, and it took them a minute to digest before Jamal spoke again.

"Well," he said slowly, "the way I see it, if you got a daddy at all, you should be happy. Most kids here ain't got one at all, so if you got one, even if he's mean as Cain, you oughta be glad about it. Maybe he be mean and hit you sometime and not take much time for you, but if he care enough to feed you an' give you someplace to sleep, you know, that's somethin'." Booth watched the boy curiously as he spoke, with more wisdom and understanding than many people twice his age, and when the boy concluded, gave a little nod.

"I guess there's something to be said for that," Booth sighed. They were both startled by a banging on the inside of the glass, and turned to see Jamal's two younger cousins beckoning them inside.

"Hey A.B.?" Jamal posed as Booth's hand rested on the door handle.

"Yeah?"

"You ended up bein' pretty a'ight." Booth smiled, and Jamal grinned back.

"Thanks, Jamal," he said. "You're pretty alright too."


	20. I'll Light the Night With Stars

**A/N:** Boy, can I tell it's almost the end of the semester. Finding mysterious notes written in my own handwriting next to my bed in the morning, that I vaguely remember jotting down before passing out from exhaustion? Check. Bloodshot eyes from staring at a computer monitor for hours on end, writing an endless stream of papers? Check. Employing math skills I never knew I had to calculate exactly what I have to get on my final to pull an A in the class? Check, check, check. The next three weeks can not possibly go by fast enough. Enjoy the chapter, and let me know what you think. I'll try to get Chapter 21 up this weekend, if I don't suffocate under the mountain of work I have to do...

* * *

_Though I keep searching for an answer  
I never seem to find what I'm looking for.  
Oh Lord, I pray you give me strength to carry on  
'Cause I know what it means  
To walk along the lonely street of dreams_

_Here I go again on my own  
Goin' down the only road I've ever known.  
Like a drifter I was born to walk alone.  
And I've made up my mind,  
I ain't wasting no more time..._

_- Here I Go Again, Whitesnake  
_

* * *

Dinner had been extremely pleasant, the three adults and three children crammed around the small dinette table laughing and elbowing one another as they ate. Two drinks were spilled and at one point a fight broke out between Jamal and Jakya, seated next to one another, so vicious that Talia threatened to douse them with water like dogs if they didn't behave. Tempers cooled and pie was served, and even Brennan helped herself to a small piece. All in all, an excellent night.

It wasn't until she was propped up against a pile of pillows in Booth's bed, half-heartedly scanning through the pages of last month's anthropological journal, that she remembered Booth's sour mood and his refusal to discuss it. He was standing at the sink in the bathroom, gargling a mouthful of Listerine, and it made her teeth grind—she hated the sound of gargling. She heard him spit, and for a while there was silence. After several minutes had passed and he still had not joined her, she set the magazine aside and looked up, leaning slightly to get at the right angle so she could see. She saw him through the doorway to the master bath, his hands on either side of the sink, staring blankly into the mirror. He didn't seem to be looking _at_ himself—just at the mirror, or something else in it.

She got up out of bed and quietly padded across the room to the bathroom, approaching him from the back and snaking her arms around his middle. She stood on her tip-toes in order to rest her chin on his shoulder, and his eyes met hers in their reflection on the mirror.

"Are you going to tell me what's bothering you?" she half asked, half sighed. He grumbled a little—not an irritated sound, but more of a settling one, the way an old house does in the middle of the night.

"My dad," he said to her reflection, shifting his gaze back to his own eyes, then down at the sink drain.

"What about him?" Brennan asked.

"Sweets wants me to see him." She felt him tense as he said the words, as if he had just vocalized something repulsive or perverse.

"He wants you to visit your father?" she asked, not sure if she was understanding properly. Why would Sweets want Booth to go back and see the man who had so viciously abused and terrorized him growing up?

"Yeah," Booth said. "I asked him on Friday, you know, how many more sessions until I'm done? He looks at me and says, You're almost there. I asked him what else was left for us to talk about, you know? I mean we've basically been over my whole life story."

"And he said?"

"He said, I want you to go see your father again, to talk to him about the past, man to man. We've never really talked since I moved out, you know. Just on the phone occasionally on holidays, or whenever Jared does something important." Booth spat the last part with some distaste, like spitting out a bad-tasting food, and Brennan rubbed some of the tension from his neck and shoulders as he continued.

"Anyway," he said, "point is that we've never talked about the past as two adults, and Sweets thinks I need to do that in order to, I don't know, _let it go_. To get some closure on it or something. He said he won't sign my release until I go to Philly and talk to him."

"That doesn't make sense to me," Brennan said. "If it's really been so many years since you've spoke to your father, if he's essentially been cut out of your life for the better, why not just let speaking dogs lie?"

"_Sleeping_ dogs," Booth corrected. "Let sleeping dogs lie."

"Oh," she said, contemplating it for a moment. "You know, that phrase makes a lot more sense that way." Booth snorted, hanging his head and letting a little laughter shake his chest. He turned and folded her up in his arms, nuzzling her hair.

"It does," he agreed, breathing her in and sighing.

"So when are you going to go?" she asked after a quiet moment.

"Honestly, I don't know," he said. "I thought about jetting up there this weekend, but I lost my nerve. It's been so long since I've seen him… I really don't want to see him again. That sounds terrible, he's my dad, but…"

"It's not terrible," she insisted. "He was terrible, to you and your entire family. He never deserved you, and you don't deserve to have to put up with him." Booth smiled and kissed the top of her head, pulling her even closer to him.

"Thanks," he said. "Unfortunately, until you're in charge of my mental file, Sweets calls the shots… little prick that he is…"

"Booth," Brennan said admonishingly, and Booth rolled his eyes.

"Yeah, yeah," he said. "My best interest at heart, whatever." She smiled up at him and he kissed her, and they both wandered back to bed. Booth extinguished the bedside lamp and curled up on his side, Brennan conforming to his curves as puzzle pieces do.

"Do you want me to go with you?" she asked hesitantly, sometime later in the dark when he was almost asleep.

"No," he murmured. "I don't want you to meet my dad."

"I'm not going to make a judgment on you based on your father's…"

"That's not what I'm afraid of."

"Then what?" she asked. He sighed, and she felt the exhale of hot air on the back of her neck.

"My dad destroys everything he touches," he said. "Everything good, everything pure, he just… he fucks everything up. I don't want you anywhere near that."

"I'm tougher than that, Booth," she insisted, but she felt him shake his head behind her.

"I just… I don't," he reiterated. "I don't want you to meet him."

"You know my father, and he's an ex-criminal," Brennan pointed out. "He killed people."

"He was never convicted," Booth defended half-heartedly.

"Booth," she said plainly. "That's not the point. You knew my father before his trial, before we knew… before we knew. Do you really want to do this alone?"

"I need to," he said. "I need to do this alone." This time he felt her sigh, and she shifted closer to him, pulling the arm draped over her shoulder more tightly around her. He felt her hot breath on his hand, holding it in hers, close to her face. She kissed the top of it.

"Okay."

oOoOoOoOo

Brennan left for work early the next morning, and by the time she returned to Booth's apartment (where many of her clothes and toiletries now lived, despite the fact that her place was much nicer) he had a duffle bag opened up on his bed and was standing in the middle of the room with his hands empty, as if he were lost there.

"How long are you going to be gone?" she asked him from the bathroom as she washed her face from the day. He frowned as he pulled a shirt off of a hanger—something she had subtly encouraged him to start doing, instead of rolling them up and shoving them into his dresser drawers like socks—and folded it.

"Well," he began, dropping the folded shirt down into the bag. "It's about a three hour drive, and I don't really plan on spending a lot of time playing catch-up with dad, so no more than a day, maybe two. If I leave early enough tomorrow morning, I might be back in time to catch dinner."

"And you're sure you don't want company?" she asked again, stepping into the bedroom. He nodded once.

"This is just me and dad, Bones," he said, leaning in and pecking her temple as she passed by. "Nothing personal." She turned to him and smiled, sweeping her hair up into a careless bun.

"I know," she said, and she did. She got it, and she'd be there when he got back to sort out whatever skeletons came stumbling out of the closet while he was gone.

oOoOoOoOo

Booth woke up just before dawn the next morning, jumping out of sleep as if someone had shocked him. He had set his alarm to go off at seven, but he had gotten so little sleep that night that there was really no point in trying to fall back asleep for another hour. It wasn't until he shuffled into the kitchen and saw the stove range light on that he realized Brennan was awake too. She was curled up on the couch in her robe, blowing steam off a cup of coffee with bleary eyes.

"No sleep for the weary?" she asked when they made eye contact across the dark room. He tried to smile, but it was contorted by a yawn.

"Nope," he said, pouring himself a cup of the coffee that she had made, which he realized was very strong upon sipping it. "Yow, how many cups did you put in this?"

"The decaf doesn't taste as strong as regular does," she insisted. "You have to add more to get the same taste."

"No," he disagreed. "This doesn't taste like coffee. This is jet fuel."

"No caffeine, no fuel," she said.

"I thought we were doing half-caff for a week or two first?" he almost whimpered, taking another sip of the sludge.

"Last week was half-caff," she said. He scowled.

"You didn't tell me that," he said.

"I know. If I had, you would've been psychologically predisposed to worse withdraw symptoms," she explained. "A lot of the power behind any substance is the knowledge that you're ingesting the substance in the first place. That's why psychiatric drugs are usually double-blind tested against placebos, to make sure the drug itself actually works instead of the improvement coming from the patient thinking the drug is working." Booth groaned—this was an awful lot of conversation for quarter 'til six in the morning, especially with her.

"You know, I'm just fine with being a caffeine addict," he grumbled.

"Well I'm not," she said. "Caffeine overstimulates the central nervous system, dehydrates the body, leeches calcium from your bones, and to be honest it upsets my stomach when I have it in lieu of a real breakfast, which seems to happen more often than not with us."

"So, what, _you_ get a tummy ache and now _I_ can't have my morning pick-me-up?" Booth asked irritably. She gave him a dirty look.

"It would be much easier for me to cut back on my caffeine consumption if you did so as well," she said. "I am much more likely to drink caffeinated beverages when you keep them in the apartment."

"That's not my problem," he muttered. She gave him a sharp look—possibly fueled in part by the lack of caffeine in her system at such an early hour—and he quickly averted his gaze to his lap. "Oh, right… it is my problem."

"Just do this with me for a little while," she asked, "and once I feel confident that I am in control of my habit and no longer feel the need to hyperstimulate my nervous system upon waking, you can have your regular coffee back, if you want it." He sighed and blew ripples on top of the black hole that was his drink.

"Fine," he said. "But I'm only doing it for you. As soon as you kick the habit, I'm stocking up on the regular stuff and there's nothing you can do about it."

"Sounds fair," she said, holding her mug up in a toast. They bumped ceramic cups in the dark, and watched the sun rise slowly through the curtains.

He left the apartment by eight, but hardly escaped D.C. traffic before nine. The drive up to Philly felt considerably longer than three hours—more like three years. He blared the radio as he sat in traffic, and once he fell out of the broadcast range for his favorite 80s station he popped in a Whitesnake CD and cranked the volume up to "eardrum-splitting."

"And I've made up my miiind," he sang as he rolled down the interstate, stomach lurching as he passed a sign that said he had just entered the beautiful state of Pennsylvania. He didn't realize how close he was. He blew out a heavy breath and gripped the steering wheel firmly. "I ain't wastin' no more time, but here I go again…"


	21. And You're Never Coming Home Again

**A/N:** Well, you guys get to benefit from my misery. I've been sick all day... that stomach-contents-in-the-back-of-your-throat, saltines-and-chamomile-tea-diet kind of sick that really makes you want to do absolutely nothing but lay in bed and hate the world. It's not like I'm surprised -- every semester without fail, I get sick the week before and of exams. Methinks I stress a little too much about finals, but hey, what can you do?

Anyway, since I've had nothing better to do with my afternoon, I got this chapter written. And let me tell you something - I have had this chapter planned in my head for a long time. I will be really interested to see your reactions to it. So with that said, enjoy, and let me know what you think.

* * *

_Let me know  
Do I still got time to grow?  
Things ain't always set in stone  
That being known, let me know  
Let me_

_Seems like street lights glowing  
Happen to be  
Just like moments passing  
In front of me  
So I hopped in the cab and  
I paid my fare  
See, I know my destination  
But I'm just not there..._

_- Street Lights, Kanye West_

* * *

Booth rounded the unfamiliar corner and rolled down the street at a snail's pace, rationalizing to himself that he needed to drive slowly in order to avoid hitting any children that might suddenly appear in the middle of the road. The truth was that there were no children in this neighborhood—not in the street, anyway. The few people he did see had their hands stuffed in their pockets, shoulders hunched, walking fast with their eyes averted to the cracked sidewalk underfoot. Some even wore heavy coats, despite the warmth of the mid-August afternoon, and Booth didn't really have to wonder what they were probably hiding underneath them. Today though, he couldn't care less.

He'd found out from Jared that their father had moved across town a few years back, unable to pay the rent on their old family house with the money he collected on his pension. He now resided in an apartment in the lower southwest part of the city, which was where Booth was currently, looking for the proper building. He found a tall, narrow brick structure tagged by a local gang, and after matching numbers with the address written tidily on the piece of paper in his lap, realized this was his father's home. He parked on the corner and walked back towards it, his hands now shoved in his own pockets for lack of anything better to do with them.

He felt bile rise to the back of this throat as he approached 2A, his father's unit. He did not want to do this. He paused in front of the building, looking up to the top of it and beyond, sighing weightily. In the distance he heard two distinctive dog barks, and further than that, the general quiet roar of the city. Philadelphia growled in a fierce, hungry way that D.C. did not, and he realized then that he did not miss it at all. Summoning whatever courage he might have left, he stepped up to the warped wooden door and, after hesitating for a moment, rapped his knuckles against it.

Nothing. He waited for a minute or two, then knocked again. He knocked louder, pounding his fist against the door and making it rattle in its frame. He did not come all this way to find an empty apartment, to have to stand around and wait for the old bastard to get home. Just as he felt his blood begin to boil, he heard steps from within the house, and that hot boil quickly plummeted to a cold sweat. He heard a man's grumbling voice drawing closer, finally reaching the other side of the door and growling, "Who is it?"

"It's… it's me," Booth said weakly, and whether it was an acceptable identifier or not didn't seem to matter. He heard the deadbolt turn in the lock. The door cracked open and he was greeted by one dark, bloodshot eye peering out at him from within the apartment.

"Who the hell…" the man began hoarsely, but stopped half-way through his sentence, red eye widening. The door closed briefly and Booth heard the chain being slid out of the lock, and it reopened widely, revealing the whole of the man that was his father.

He was much shorter than Booth remembered him being. His back was a little hunched, stooped with age, and at his tallest he might have come up to Booth's nose. In Booth's mind his father had been a giant, as broad as a barn and strong enough to lift one. Of course, all children believe that of their father, but seeing as his dad had demonstrated that monstrous strength against the back of his head more than once, he was more inclined to believe it. His father's skin was pale and sallow, his jowly cheeks hanging loose from his powerful jaw. What had once been a square, powerful frame had turned soft and round with age, and he wobbled slightly even just standing before him. His hair was thin and greasy, strands clinging to the side of his head and mostly absent from the top. He was only sixty-five or sixty-six, but he looked at least ten years older. For some reason Booth had imagined his father to be the robust, powerful man he had left behind almost twenty years ago, untouched by time. He knew this was foolish, but somewhere in the back of his mind, he believed.

"Seeley?" his dad asked, squinting hard at him as if he were in the far distance. Booth nodded, cocking his head slightly and giving a hesitant smile.

"Yeah, dad," he said. "It's me." His father stood with his arms limp, face warped with dawning comprehension, just staring for a while. Then a smile split his sagging face and he reached out and patted Booth on the shoulder. Booth flinched subconsciously, and was not sure if it reflected in his actions or not, but he kept smiling.

"Well, come in," his father croaked, punctuating the sentence with a deep, dry cough. He stepped aside to let Booth in, shutting the door and relocking it behind him, carefully placing the chain and twisting the bolt.

What first hit Booth was the darkness of the house. It was like stepping into a cave—the narrow hallway was lit only by the glow of the television coming through the doorway at the end of it. Even though it was a bright, cloudless afternoon outside, there was no sign of it in the house—his father must have had every window heavily covered to achieve that kind of darkness. They navigated the shadowy corridor, carefully stepping around piles of old newspaper and trash bags that had only made it as far as the hall, and Booth held his breath against the acrid stench that escaped from them. The entire house, he discovered as they made their way into the far living room, was infused with an off smell, like cigarette smoke and something sour and damp.

In the living room itself, dark curtains hung over the barred windows Booth had seen from the outside, effectively blocking out the sun. The room was lit by the bright, slightly fuzzy screen of a small television sitting on an end table across the room, which was otherwise mostly empty. Aside from the trash bags and newspaper stacks in the hall, it had been empty too—no coat hanger, no pictures adorning the walls, not even as much as a hook for his keys. His father moaned as he lowered himself into the same recliner he had been sitting in for over twenty years—Booth recognized the blue houndstooth pattern and the beaten seat cushion immediately. It was, like him, much worse for the past twenty years—there were cigarette burns on the arms, and there was almost nothing left of the cushioning in the seat.

"You want one?" his father asked, picking up a pack of cigarettes from the small round end table next to the chair and holding them out in offering. Booth shook his head, and his father shrugged, pulling one out and lighting it. He took a long draw and expelled it with a wheezing hack. The way he looked, illuminated by the NASCAR race playing out on the screen, he already looked dead—like a semi-translucent ghost sitting in his father's chair, taking a drag off of a cigarette and watching him with a peculiar look.

"I, uh…" Booth stumbled, not really knowing what to say to the man sitting before him. He was the father he remembered, but at the same time, nothing like him at all.

"Long time no see, huh?" his father asked, saving Booth from having to initiate the conversation. He let out a sigh and nodded.

"Yeah," he said, taking this angle of conversation and running with it. "Yeah, it has been… a really long time. How have you been?" His dad shrugged, vaguely motioning at his surroundings.

"Gettin' by," he said. "I guess Jared told you I moved?" Booth nodded, folding his hands in his lap and feeling much too big for the stiff-backed chair he sat in. It was like a toy chair, a doll chair, something so fragile that it might snap beneath his weight.

"Yeah, he gave me the address," Booth said, eyes flicking over to the television screen and back to his father. "I didn't know you guys, uhm, talked."

"He gives his old man a call every once in a while," his father said. "Just checkin' in on me I guess. It's been about a year since I heard from 'im though—I got rid of my phone. Piece of junk, ya know? Not worth the money."

"Right," Booth said, not knowing what else to fill the empty space with. His father cleared his throat and excused himself, hoisting himself out of the chair and exiting the room. He came back with two cold beers, and held one out to Booth.

"No, I'm alright, thanks," he said. The last thing on the entire planet he wanted to do was drink with his father.

"What are you, some kinda religious nut?" his father asked irately, uncapping both beers and setting them on the side table. He didn't wait for a response, though, and switched topics. "So what are you doing with yourself now? Still in the army?"

"No, I work for the FBI now," he answered, pulling his badge out of his pocket and tossing it to his father, who let it land in his lap. He picked it up and flipped it open, examining it.

"Special Agent, huh?" he asked. Booth nodded.

"Yeah," he said. "For, wow, over ten years now."

"That's somethin'," his father said, tossing the badge back. "I don't see a ring, you still single?"

"No, not single, just not married" he said, realizing just how little his father knew about his life.

"Any kids?" his dad asked. Booth nodded.

"One," he said. "A boy, Parker. He's seven."

"You got a picture of him?" he asked. Booth nodded and got up from the seat, pulling his wallet out of his back pocket and flipping it open. He handed it to his father, who surveyed the picture with an approving smile.

"Looks like you," he said, handing the wallet back to Booth. "Looks a lot like you. Same eyes, smile, all that. You still with his mom?" Booth shook his head.

"Things didn't work out between us," he admitted. His father shrugged.

"It happens," he said. "Your ma wasn't one of my biggest fans either, you know." Booth stiffened when his father mentioned his mother. As if he had any right to.

"She died," Booth said plainly. His father looked up from the bottom of his first empty beer, eyebrows raised.

"Your mother?" he asked. Booth nodded. "Is that so?"

"Yeah, over a month ago, in July." His father sighed, starting on the second beer.

"Shame," he said. "Alice was a good woman, really."

"Wouldn't know from the way you treated her," Booth said darkly. His father looked up from his beer, and they stared coldly at each other from across the room.

"Times were hard," his father finally said after some calculated thought. "Money was tight, the shop wasn't doing so well…"

"That didn't give you a reason to beat the shit out of her, or us," Booth said loudly, feeling his hands tremble. He hoped his voice wouldn't.

"I know," his father said exhaustedly, finishing off the rest of the second beer and setting it heavily on the table next to him. "But you try keeping two kids and a wife on no money and see how rosy you feel at the end of the day, when they just won't get out of your face. Clean this, fix that, daddy, look at me... I mighta got a little angry, sure, but that's life kid." He fell into a coughing fit, his body shaking from the force of it. His breathing finally settled and he reclined back in the chair, closing his eyes.

"How can you sit here and just act like everything you did was okay?" Booth asked incredulously, rising quickly from the chair with his fists balled subconsciously. "How can you really think that?"

"Seeley," his father said with a long, weary sigh as he opened his eyes and looked up at Booth. "If you wanted to pick this fight, you're about ten years too late. I'm too tired to worry about the past anymore. I got nothin' to my name—no family, no friends, just a crummy little apartment and some creature comforts. If you wanna be mad at me, be mad. I'd already figured I'd never see you again… you always took things so personal. But you're kickin' a dead horse, son. This horse is dead." Booth stared down at his father for what felt like forever, seemingly watching the man before him waste away until there was nothing left but the indentation on the old chair. He sighed and sat back down in the toy seat.

"You know," his father added, "you don't seem like you turned out so bad, even with an asshole like me as your old man." Booth looked up and saw something in his father's eyes—something deeply buried, like remorse or empathy, or both. He was probably imagining it. What was it Brennan had said to him once? _When you appraise a situation subjectively, you see what you want to see. That's why you must view everything through an objective lens. Only through objectivity can we see things for what they really are._

"Thanks," Booth said, rising from the chair. "I guess I'm going to head out. I really don't know why I came here."

"Either way, I'm glad you did," his father said, struggling to lift himself out of the chair. He walked Booth back down the dark hallway and undid the locks, pulling the door open and flooding the dusty hall with late afternoon sunshine. Booth stepped out and turned, his father looking up at him from just inside, squinting against the light.

"I know you don't believe it," he said, "but I always loved you kids. Always will."

Booth opened his mouth uselessly, completely taken aback by his father's words. Never in his memory had his father said that he loved him—there were a few times he said "I'm proud of you" or "You're alright, kid", but never an "I love you." That was strictly the territory of his mother, and in later years, grandfather.

"Like I said," his father said, shifting his weight, "I know you don't believe it. You don't have to. I wouldn't either." Booth closed his mouth and nodded, swallowing hard.

"I… I love you too, dad," he finally said. His father smiled sadly.

"That makes you a better man than me," he said. "I hated my father 'til the day he died. Maybe you won't have to." With that he patted Booth on the arm and closed the door, leaving him standing alone on the stoop. It wasn't until he buckled his seat belt and looked up into the rear-view mirror that he really let himself cry.


	22. We'll All Float On

**A/N:** You know, this happened with _Foster Child_ too. I didn't realize this was going to be the last chapter until I wrote it, and it just kind of wrapped itself up. This fic is actually about ten chapters longer than I ever anticipated it being, so now seems like a fairly good time to bring it to a close. I won't bore you with my comments now, though... I'll save all my boring comments for the Epilogue. :) For now, enjoy the final chapter, and let me know what you think.

* * *

_Alright already, we'll all float on  
Alright, don't worry  
Even if things end up  
A bit too heavy  
We'll all float on...  
_

_- Float On, Modest Mouse  
_

* * *

"Agent Booth, you're on time," Sweets remarked as Booth let himself into the therapist's office on Friday afternoon, careful to catch the heavy wood door just before it slammed. The windows of the therapist's office were thrown open to catch the breeze, a cold snap having blown in the previous night and bringing unseasonably cool weather for August. Nobody was complaining—summer had burned on for far too long, and relief was welcomed with open arms.

"I was on time last week too," Booth said, less grouchily than he might have in previous sessions. Maybe it was the beauty of the day, or a relief of some other kind, but he did not feel nearly as irritable towards the therapist as he normally did. Sweets nodded.

"It's a good habit to have," he said, taking a seat in his chair across from the couch. Booth lowered himself onto the cushions gingerly, trying not to wince but betraying himself. Sweets frowned.

"Something wrong?" he asked. Booth waved him off.

"Nothing," he said, voice strained. "It's just my back, is all."

"Too much heavy lifting?" Sweets asked. He shook his head, settling into an awkward, slouched position that seemed to alleviate some of the pain.

"Too much sitting," he said. "Bones and I were testing out Lay-Z-Boy recliners during her lunch break yesterday. I think I got up and sat down one too many times."

"Bummer," Sweets said, letting the youthful phrase slip without much thought. "Your place or hers?"

"Neither," Booth said, a new discomfort flashing across his face that seemed to have little to do with his back pain. "It's, well… it's for my dad. He, uhm, you know, he could use a new one." Sweets's eyebrows shot up his forehead, eyes widened with curiosity.

"So you went to see your father?" he asked innocuously. Booth nodded.

"Yeah," he said. "Monday."

"How did that go?"

"It, uhm…" Booth's head tilted side to side, as if he was unable to decide. "It was okay. Not great, but, you know, not terrible. It was alright. Could've been worse."

"Did Dr. Brennan accompany you?"

"No," Booth said resolutely, shaking his head.

"Was that her decision or yours?" Sweets asked.

"Mine," Booth said. "I didn't really want her meeting my dad. Plus, I kind of needed to do it alone."

"Were you afraid of her judging you in light of your father's flaws?" Sweets asked. Booth frowned.

"You know, she asked me the same thing."

"That was surprisingly intuitive of her," Sweets said. "Was that the reason?"

"No," Booth said. "Well, yeah. No. I don't know."

"Maybe a little?" Sweets asked, holding his fingers about an inch apart. Booth scowled at him.

"I don't know," he said. "I thought about it, yeah, but that's not really it. I just… she didn't need to meet him. She didn't need to deal with that."

"You wanted to protect her from having to interact with him," Sweets posited. "You wanted to protect her from him, the way your mother tried to protect you." Booth ruminated on Sweets's words for a minute before inclining his head slightly.

"I guess," he admitted. "Maybe." Sweets tried not to smile.

"You know, Agent Booth," he began, leaning back in his seat, "there was a time not long ago when you would have argued with me about that until you were blue in the face."

"Yeah, well, things change," Booth said.

"What do you think has changed?" he asked. Booth groaned.

"Why do shrinks always gotta ask questions like that?" he asked. "Really, what is it with you guys? Everything's gotta be a question." Sweets did not suppress his laughter this time.

"That's what we're trained to do," he said. "We ask questions that make you look at yourself introspectively, that force you to reflect on your thoughts and behaviors and figure out what's really going on in there."

"But it's like you ask questions you already know the answer to," Booth groused. "It's irritating."

"That's the point," Sweets said. "When I ask you questions, I'm not doing it for my health. I'm not doing it to get information for me—it's to get information for _you_. When you answer my questions, it lets you reflect on the things you say and do; it lets you see yourself from a different perspective. I'm just a mirror, Agent Booth. That's all you really needed—a mirror to look into."

"Sweets, let me tell you something," Booth said, trying to sit up despite the taunt pain in his back.

"What's that?" Sweets asked, leaning forward in his seat. Booth cleared his throat.

"I'm man enough to admit when I was wrong about something," he stated plainly. "I don't like to, but when I'm wrong, I own up to it. And I…" Booth sighed, rolling his eyes. "I was wrong, about you, and this."

"Oh?" Sweets said without indication as to his feelings.

"Yeah," Booth said. "I was. I did need your help, because you were… right." Booth forced up the _r-word_ like it tasted bad, then cleared his throat again and continued. "There was a lot of stuff I never really let go of with my dad, you know? And that kind of stuff just sits in you and rots. I didn't realize it was affecting me still; it's like it was so deep in me, I couldn't even see it. But now I see it, and I feel like if I can acknowledge it, you know, I can make it right. I can let it go.

"When I went to see my dad, he said he spent his whole life hating his father, right up to the day he died. I don't want to resent him like that, I don't want to breathe easier the day he dies, you know? He's my father."

"You love your father," Sweets said quietly. Booth nodded.

"I love my father," he said.

"It's very difficult to acknowledge that level of anger and resentment, that hate, towards somebody you also love very much," Sweets said. "To have such strong, opposite feelings about one person is very conflicting."

"Love and hate aren't opposites," Booth said.

"Then what is the opposite of love?" Sweets asked.

"Indifference," Booth said simply. "The opposite of love is not giving a shit. If you hate somebody, though… you can't feel that kind of fire towards somebody you don't care about. You almost have to love somebody, to hate them. When it comes down to love and hate, they're only a step apart, really. They're not that different. They're consuming, they're powerful, they shadow everything else you've got going on… the only difference is that one makes you happy, and the other doesn't."

"That's extremely insightful," Sweets said, and his face showed that he truly felt it.

"And for the record, I didn't hate my father," Booth added. "I hate what he did to us as kids, and what he did to mom… I hate his alcoholism, yeah. I hate a lot of things about him, but I don't hate _him_. I love him. Always will."

"It takes a lot to love someone unconditionally," Sweets said. "It takes even more to acknowledge that a person is separate from their actions, and that you can love them even in light of those actions. I think I owe you an apology as well, Agent Booth—I greatly underestimated your insightfulness."

"No, you didn't," Booth said. "I wouldn't have been able to see that without all these sessions. That's what let me see, you know, that I can love my dad and still hate what he did to us. I used to think it was all or nothing—love it all, or hate it all. That's what killed me, was feeling like I had to say everything was okay, when it wasn't. Like to love him, I had to love what he did. But I get it now—I don't have to. I just couldn't see it before. You helped me a lot, Sweets."

"Like I said," Sweets said with a knowing smile. "Everything that comes to light in therapy, you've always had in you, good and bad. Sometimes you just have to look in the mirror."

"Well, either way, thanks," Booth said. Sweets nodded, rising from his chair and walking around the side of his desk. He pulled out a sheet of paper from the bottom drawer, taking a moment to fill in a few blanks before signing off on the bottom. He walked across the room and handed it to Booth, smiling widely. Booth looked down—it was a clearance form, acknowledging that he was released from therapy and could safely return to work.

"I'm done?" he asked hesitantly. Sweets nodded.

"You're done," he said. "Take that to Cullen, and you'll be reinstated."

"I'm done," Booth repeated, a smile of dawning comprehension beginning to spread across his face.

"Well, you still have partners therapy with Dr. Brennan," Sweets said. "But as far as our one-on-one therapy goes, yes, you are done. You'll be back to work on Monday."

"Just like that?" Booth asked, rising from the couch.

"Just like that," Sweets said, punctuating the sentence with a snap of the fingers. "You're free to go now, Agent Booth. Have a nice afternoon."

"Thanks, Sweets," Booth said, shaking Sweets's hand. "Really, thank you."

"If you ever need to discuss anything, you know I'm here," Sweets said. Booth shook his head.

"Oh no, I've done enough 'discussing' for a lifetime, thanks," he said with a grin. "Oh, and Sweets?"

"What?" he asked as he held the door open for Booth.

"I uh… I'm sorry I said you were twelve," Booth said sheepishly. "I guess you're a little smarter than a twelve year old."

"A little, huh?" Sweets asked sarcastically.

"Yeah, you know, just a little," Booth said, mocking Sweets's earlier motion and pinching an imaginary grape with his thumb and index finger as he walked out the door alone for the last time.

oOoOoOoOo

Brennan loved being in the lab on afternoons like this one. When the sky was a deep, saturated cloudless blue, the entire glass ceiling of the lab seemed too bright and too beautiful to be real. She knew it was completely irrational, but part of her felt as if she were being given a special treat—like under normal circumstances the sky wouldn't be this blue, the sun wouldn't shine this brightly, the world wouldn't seem so big. Instead of pondering the impermanence of such unreal beauty, however, she decided to simply soak it in and enjoy it for what it was. To, as Booth would put it, _be one with the universe_.

"Dr. Brennan?" She opened her eyes and looked down from the catwalk, where she was examining conchoidial fractures within a fifteenth-century skull that she believed to be Native American, possibly Calusa Indian based on the location of the find. A security guard stood just inside the automatic doors, a tall black woman standing beside him.

"Talia?" she asked.

"So you do know her, then?" the guard asked, and Talia gave him a sour look.

"I told you, we're friends," she said. Brennan nodded, descending from the platform down to where Talia and the guard stood.

"Yes," she said. "We are. Is everything alright?" she asked. The guard shrugged and left them alone, and Talia looked around before she spoke.

"Do you got a office or somewhere we can talk?" she asked. Brennan nodded, leading the way towards her office. She found it peculiar that Talia was not in her cleaning uniform; any time she saw her during the week, and sometimes on weekends, she was always zipped up in the starched blue blouse and skirt, white apron tied around her waist, reeking of Pine-Sol and a lemony zest.

Brennan let them into her office and shut the door behind her, effectively soundproofing the room. She often wished her office were not glass paned, so that she might be able to have personal conversations without the entire world watching, but her single request to Goodman for a remodel had been quickly denied. Best-selling author or no, the Jeffersonian was not willing to spend thousands of dollars constructing real walls. _Buy curtains_ had been his parting advice to her. Talia sat on the couch, crossing her legs and bouncing her foot anxiously. Brennan took a seat in her rolling chair, turning it to face the woman.

"What's going on?" Brennan asked. "Is everything okay?" Talia started with a hesitant nod, then shook her head.

"I got laid off," she said. "Last week. Company was losin' money, said they didn't need so many cleaners anymore, cut about a third of the girls out."

"That's terrible," Brennan said, and she meant it. "I'm very sorry to hear that."

"Me too," Talia said. "Can't nobody get a job, economy the way it is. I was lucky to get that one, now I ain't even had it six months and it's gone." Her leg continued to bounce furiously, and if her tennis shoe hadn't been securely tied to her foot, Brennan thought it might go flying through the glass-paned walls. That actually wouldn't be so bad.

"Have you been to the temp agency downtown?" Brennan asked. Talia nodded.

"Day after I got fired," she said. "They ain't got no jobs, nobody got any. I looked in the paper, went down to the library an' got on the computer, asked around… all the jobs get snatched up 'fore they even get talked about." Brennan sighed, not sure what she could do or offer that would make the situation better.

"Something has to come up eventually," she finally said, feeling like that was the proper response of consolation. "What about Temporary Assistance for Needy Families until then? I believe you would meet the Virginia state requirements for that."

"Temperance, I _been_ on TANF," Talia said, her voice strained. "I started it when Jakya was born, then went off, went back on after Shante, was off those six months I was in rehab, got back on as soon as I got out. It ain't like I don't work, I do. I never graduated high school, though—you can't make more'n minimum wage without a diploma, nobody gonna pay you more than that. Seven bucks an hour don't put food on the table, not for three people, four now."

"Isn't there a time limit on TANF?" Brennan asked. Talia nodded.

"Sixty months," Talia said. "Five years."

"Isn't Jakya five?" Brennan asked. Talia sighed.

"You seein' it now," she said gravely. "I got four months left on TANF. After that, they cut me off. Where I gonna get money from then? How I'm'a pay for a place to sleep, food, electric, if I ain't even got a job? An' my credit's so bad, shit, they wouldn't give me money if it was fallin' from the sky." Brennan mimed Talia's sigh, leaning back in her seat and running a hand through her hair. While five years sounded like a long time to be on welfare benefits on paper, in reality for someone in Talia's position, a lifetime of welfare wouldn't be enough, not to give her and her children everything they needed. Poverty, Brennan knew, was the great equalizer of all civilizations—there wasn't a culture in the modern world that didn't experience some degree of poverty, and it seemed that the wealthier they became, the greater the gap between the haves and have-nots.

"Do you want me to see if there are any positions open in the museum that you might be eligible for?" Brennan asked. Talia nodded slightly.

"I'd appreciate it," she said. "But that ain't the favor I come to ask." Talia leaned forward in her seat, not staring Brennan in the eyes but seeming to search her face for something she knew was there but could not see. She swallowed hard, and Brennan subconsciously mimicked the action.

"What did you come to ask?" Brennan asked slowly. Talia pressed her lips together, staring down at her clasped hands, then up at Brennan. Their eyes met, and she saw a fierce intensity in Talia's that took her off guard.

"Do you love Jamal?" Talia asked. This also caught Brennan by surprise, and it took a moment for her brain to wrap around the question.

"I, well," Brennan said, stumbling over her words. "I do care very deeply for…"

"No," Talia said, standing up suddenly. "That ain't enough. You gotta _love_ him. You gotta say you love him with everything in you. I gotta know that boy be your world, your heart, that you'd do anything for 'im. That you'd give yo' life for 'im. You can care about 'im all you want, but I gotta know you love him. Do you? Do you love him?" Talia's words rang through the silent office, and Brennan was struck by their poignancy, but more importantly, their fire. She stared down at Brennan hard, as if willing her to crack beneath her gaze. Brennan chewed the inside of her cheek, inhaling deeply and letting it escape in a slow sigh. Her tongue darted out onto her lips, wetting them before she spoke.

"Yes," she said, voice wavering. She cleared her throat and continued. "I love him, very much. Much more than I wanted to at first. Why?" Talia nodded in a satisfied way, as if Brennan had given her exactly the green light she needed to make her request.

"I knew you did," she said quietly, sitting back down on the couch and leaning in on her elbows, looking down at the floor. "I knew you loved 'im, almost as much as I did. Could see it in the way you said goodbye, can hear it in his voice when he talk about you. You gave 'im everything he ever need, not 'cause you had to but 'cause you wanted to. You want everything for him, everything the world got to give. I want everything for 'im too—but I cain't give it to 'im. You can."

"Talia, what are you asking me?" Brennan's voice cracked as she posed the question, understanding good and well what the question—the offer, really—was. She felt her chest tighten, and struggled to pull in a deep, calming breath. Talia blinked back the moisture in her eyes.

"Temperance," she said, "I want Jamal to live with you. I want you to adopt him."

"What?" Brennan coughed.

"You love him," Talia said. "You can give him everything, everything I can't. With you he got the world—with me, he got nothin'."

"He's got family with you, Talia," Brennan said quietly, in contrast to Talia's increasing volume. "You're his aunt."

"You don't think you his family too?" Talia asked, almost angrily. "He love you just as much as family, whether he say it or not. And you love him too, just like yours. You made him your family when he ain't had nobody—I'm askin' you to do it again."

"Talia, I—"

"They asked him to be a jitterbug," Talia blurted, interrupting whatever Brennan was about to say.

"Who, what?" Brennan asked, having no idea what a 'jitterbug' was, or who Talia was talking about.

"The gang, the gang that be around where we live," Talia elaborated. "They came up to Jamal last weekend, asked if he wanna be a jitterbug for them."

"What's a jitterbug?" she asked.

"They find kids, boys, 'bout eleven or twelve, right at Jamal's age. They give 'em money, send 'em down to the store or to another house, make 'em buy guns for 'em. That way can't nobody trace it to the one who bought it, 'cause it's just a kid."

"A… a gang member asked Jamal to buy _guns_ for him?" Brennan asked, too shocked and repulsed to fully comprehend the explanation. Now Talia was truly crying, and Brennan tossed her a box of tissues from the corner of her desk.

"He gettin' older every day," Talia wept. "I cain't protect him no more. If he stay with me, if he stay in the ghetto, they just gonna swallow him up. Temperance, I don't wanna see 'im die." Talia wept into her hands, and Brennan screwed her eyes shut tight until white lights popped in front of them.

"Please," she heard Talia say, just beyond her eyelids where the rest of the world was. "I need this. He need this. I can't…"

_I can't raise a ten year old__  
criminal, the system will turn__  
a hood rat, gonna be ugly but  
he needs you and  
you'll be the best parent Jamal ever had  
make mistakes and learn  
That ain't fair and  
you're better than a good foster parent, you're  
not thrown away, because there's nothing wrong with you  
make a wish,  
we already have and I tell you  
all that glitters is not  
worth kicking  
Bye doc  
did she ever get past the  
hurt so much, but  
make a wish  
she sent me for stamps and  
come back on Sunday or  
will you forget him?  
you oughta be glad about  
ending up pretty a'ight when  
this might have never existed so  
look in the mirror, and  
wish to wake up._

oOoOoOoOo

The following July was just as hot as the one before it. Brennan felt sweat creep towards her brow as she lugged two gallon-sized containers of Neapolitan ice cream from the back of Booth's SUV to the picnic bench they had set up with a vinyl "Happy Birthday" tablecloth and weighted balloons on each corner. A pile of presents overtook one of the benches, and her father sat on the other side, watching a group of children, plus a few adult additions, battle for the basketball. Brennan set the ice cream tubs on the table, and Booth followed shortly behind her, carefully laying the large sheet cake to rest.

"If we don't eat soon, everything's going to melt," he observed, and Brennan nodded, taking a breath and wiping her forehead on the back of her wrist. Booth pecked her cheek as he walked past her, towards the basketball court to round up the kids. Brennan turned around and saw a worn ragged Oldsmobile whip into the parking lot, taking a space closest to them. Two girls jumped out of the car and ran out towards their cousin, while a tall black woman struggled to carry two oddly-shaped packages without dropping either of them. Brennan met her half-way, taking one of the gifts in hand.

"Thanks," Talia said, taking the other in both hands and walking alongside Brennan towards the picnic table. "I hope we ain't hold y'all up…"

"No, Booth was just going to tell everyone the cake was on, you're right on time," Brennan said, smiling as she glanced across the grassy stretch and saw Booth trying to break up the heated sports-induced argument between Hodgins and Sweets. No matter how much anthropological training she had, Brennan did not think she would ever fully understand men and sports.

"Good," Talia said, greeting Angela, Cam, Russ, Amy, and Max as they reached the table. Max jumped and guiltily hid the lighter behind his back, giving his daughter a sheepish grin. She rolled her eyes and proceeded to unbox the cake, which was covered in icing basketballs and proudly proclaimed, _Happy 12__th__ Birthday Jamal!_ in sticky orange icing. She heard the stampede of children rushing towards the table, and vaguely heard squeals of "Cake!" over the uproar.

"'Scuse me, 'scuse me, move!" she heard Jamal grumble as he fought his way towards the front of his group of friends, which had grown considerably since the last year to include many from school, as well as his young cousins. Brennan gave him an admonishing look as he reached the front.

"Move _please_, I meant," he said, trying to conceal his crooked smile.

"Dad, you want to light the candles?" Brennan asked her father, who beamed and acquiesced. Two neat rows of flames floundered in the summer breeze, barely shielded by the wall of onlookers crowded around the table.

"You better make a wish quick, or they're going to get blown out for you," Booth observed, standing just behind Brennan and wrapping his arms around her waist. She rested her hands on top of his, leaning back into his chest and sighing contentedly.

"I'm thinkin'," Jamal said, biting his lip and frowning slightly as he gave what was apparently a large amount of thought to the wish at hand. Brennan hoped that maybe, one day, he might never have anything to wish for at all. She knew she didn't.

"Okay, got it," he said, bouncing in place and gripping the edge of the table like it might blow away too. He shut his eyes and was still for a moment, moving his lips vaguely as he sent whatever wishes he had up to the heavens. Satisfied he opened his eyes and leaned forward, taking in a deep breath and blowing out the small flames blinking over the cake.

Wisps of smoke unfurled like blossoming flowers, and Booth and Brennan both found themselves following them with their eyes as they floated skyward, particles floating further and further apart into the abyss until they were only traces in the sky, and then became the sky, turning into infinity.

She looked down at the same moment Jamal looked up and smiled at her, and she felt like infinity too.


	23. Epilogue: Shine a Little Light, Alright

_"If you leap awake in the mirror of a bad dream  
And for a fraction of a second you can't remember where you are  
Just open your window and follow your memory upstream  
To the meadow in the mountain  
Where we counted every falling star…"_

_- Father and Daughter, Paul Simon_

_

* * *

_

It's finished! This is really similar to the feeling I had when I completed "The Foster Child in the Forensic Anthropologist." When you spend so much time on a story (even a fanfic), and really put a lot of yourself into it, there's always that bittersweet feeling at the end. You don't want it to be over—you want the story to go on, to live on, to keep being. You get attached, you get involved, and it becomes almost a relationship between you and the story. You give it life, and it gives you a pool in which you can reflect on your own.

Speaking of reflections… does the title of the story make sense now? I have had some people bring up the title with their theories as to where it came from, and nobody was wrong, really. There are a lot of things explored in here, and each of those avenues is really to some degree an accurate reflection of the meaning (excuse the pun). My main idea was that Booth had to reflect on his past, on the bad dream that he escaped and hoped to never return to. He had to put those nightmares to rest, to finally face them and understand them... and in understanding them, understand himself.

Because the truth is, you can't carry that around with you for your entire life, all that resentment and pain and anger, and just be "okay" with it. It always digs at you, and if you never let it go, it will just keep emptying you until there's nothing left. I'm sure all of you have had something happen in your life—be it the magnitude of what Booth faced in the story or not—that you had to square off with. Everyone does, and if you haven't, it's only because it's coming in the future (sorry, I don't mean to be a downer, but nobody escapes life without a few hard knocks).

When we are faced with those challenges, we can take them one of two ways. We can run from the pain and suffering, or bury it deep within us, whatever it takes to try and escape so we don't have to deal with it. The problem with that is that it doesn't go away, it just waits for the opportune moment to remind you that yes, it's still there, and you can't ignore it away. On the other hand, we can face it, and in facing it come to an understanding and move on.

That is what I wanted Booth to do with his father—to embrace what happened to him as a child and young adult, accept the pain, and move on with his life. Because his life is great now—he has Brennan, he has Parker, he has his job and his friends. He has grown into a true man, a good man, but he can't be a whole person with part of him weighed down by the pain of the past. Nobody can. I can't, you can't, not even our main man Booth can. Only by letting go can we grab onto something better, which is the gift of the here and now. You only have two hands; you can't hold tight to the past, and simultaneously reach out for all the good things life has to offer. You can only hold one, and as obvious as the right choice is, many of us have a hard time letting go.

Okay, I am getting off my soapbox now, I promise. (I think.) Throughout this fic I have credited the lyrics used in the beginning of each chapter, but as of yet I have not listed and credited the lyrics used in the title of each chapter. That I intend to do now, in order. Each of these songs is great, and each holds a special meaning to the chapter it heads off. If you haven't picked up on those meanings yet, maybe now you will.

Chapter 1: Lean on Me – Kirk Franklin

Chapter 2: Father of Mine – Everclear

Chapter 3: Wonderful – Everclear

Chapter 4: I Can – Nas

Chapter 5: Numb – Linkin Park

Chapter 6: I'll Stand By You – Carrie Underwood

Chapter 7: Hallelujah – Jeff Buckley

Chapter 8: Syndicate – The Fray

Chapter 9: Broken Bridge – Daughter Darling

Chapter 10: I Want a Mom – Cyndi Lauper

Chapter 11: Say When – The Fray

Chapter 12: Sweet Child o' Mine – Guns and Roses

Chapter 13: Flood – Jars of Clay

Chapter 14: Nobody's Home – Avril Lavigne

Chapter 15: The Story – Brandi Carlile

Chapter 16: In the Sun – Michael Stipe

Chapter 17: Soul Meets Body – Death Cab for Cutie

Chapter 18: Today Will Be Better, I Swear! – Stars

Chapter 19: Toy Soldiers – Martika

Chapter 20: Whispers in the Dark – Skillet

Chapter 21: Swans – Unkle Bob

Chapter 22: Float On – Modest Mouse

All songs are the property of their respective owners, and all are excellent. If you want to cry, listen to the song, "I Want a Mom" by Cyndi Lauper. It gave me the inspiration to write that chapter the way I did.

I guess that's all there really is left to say here. I sincerely hope you enjoyed reading this, because I loved writing it. For those of you who read, reviewed, favorited, alerted… thank you so much. It means the world to me, to know that you like what you've read and you want to read more. To read your reviews—your feelings, your stories, your triumphs, your pain—brings validation to everything I hope and pray about humanity. That people are good. That people survive. That people love, because above all things, love is all we have. It is _all_ we have.

Really, I promise, I'm done now. The last thing I want to say before I go is simple and uncharacteristically succinct of me, and I hope you use it to your advantage in life:

Reflect.

Best,

K.E.


End file.
